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Division 


Section 








THE SURVIVAL VALUE 
OF CHRISTIANITY 





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BY , 
JOHN MOFFATT “MECKLIN, Pu.D. 


PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGH. 
AUTHOR OF “AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL 
ETHICS,” “THE KU KLUX KLAN,” ETC. 


Let him who says when he reads my book, 
“Certainly I understand what is said, but it 
is not true,” assert, if he pleases, his own 
opinion, and refute mine if he is able. And if 
he do this with charity and truth, and take 
the pains to make it known to me (if I am 
still alive) I shall then receive the most 
abundant fruit of this my labor. 


AUGUSTINE, De Trinitate, I, 3, 5. 





NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, ING. 


PRINTED IN THE U.S. A BY 
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC, 
RAHWAY, N. J. 





i a To 
HENRY STANHOPE BUNTING 


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a 


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Foreword 


M* are debating today as never before the 
origin, history, and enduring worth of the 
Christian faith. In offering the following pages 
as a possible contribution to this debate the 
writer is painfully aware of the difficulty, not to 
say the futility, of his task. There is first of all 
the diversity of belief, due to differences of tem- 
perament and tradition, which is all but insur- 
mountable. There is secondly the deep aversion 
of the pious soul to the critical attitude in reli- 
gion. The Fundamentalist reader will doubtless 
find the frank criticisms of his point of view un- 
pleasant, but the writer must remind him that 
Fundamentalist leaders have not been particu- 
larly sparing of the feelings of their opponents. 
The New Testament scholar will perhaps be in- 
clined to challenge many statements dealing with 
the exceedingly difficult questions as to the origin 
of Christianity. Finally, the strenuous applica- 
tion of the distinction between fact and fiction, 
which is the guiding principle of the book, has 


Af 


vi FOREWORD 


lent to the pages that follow a negative tinge 
which was not intentional, but which, perhaps, is 
in a measure unavoidable. 

The writer begs his reader not to be misled by 
the large title of this little book. It is no blast 
of the archangel’s trump bidding to a last great 
assize. The writer is not so rash as to essay a 
final evaluation of a faith whose vitality nineteen 
centuries have failed to exhaust. The task he 
has set himself is much more modest. It is to 
determine the principles by which our age must 
revalue its Christian heritage. Such an inevi- 
table revaluation is not the death-knell of faith 
as many imagine. It may be an indication of a 
new lease on life. 


HANOVER, N. H., 
November 12, 1925. 


secede nate 


Oye wo 


Contents 


CHAPTER I 
Tue CHALLENGE OF F'UNDAMENTALISM 


ORTHODOXY BY LEGISLATION 

WHY FUNDAMENTALISM ? : : : 
THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION IN AMERICAN LIFE . 
THE HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM ; 
THE ISSUE : : P : ‘ ; : k 


CHAPTER II 
THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 
THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION AMONG THE MENTAL 
PROCESSES ; : ! 
THE PROBLEM OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 
THE SYMBOLS OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 
THE DECAY OF DOGMA . , s : : f 
THE DILEMMA OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION . 
SYMBOL AND REALITY ‘ : ; : : 


CHAPTER III 
JESUS OR CHRIST 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY . , } , ; 3 
THE ‘‘SON OF MAN’’ ; ; : fl ; : 
THE LORD OF GLORY ‘ } f ‘ 


‘SAND THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELT 
AMONG US’’ . , ; , 5 : : 
Vil 


58 
64 
69 
17 
89 
101 


108 
125 
138 


151 


Vlil 


om 


DOE o9 


CONTENTS 
CHAPTER IV 
Wuar Is CuristiAnity? 


THE PROBLEM . Be ee . . . 
THE FUNDAMENTALIST AND HIS MENTAL STEREO- 
TYPES 


LIBERALISM ° ° ° ° . . ° 
CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 
MODERNISM . 3 . . : ° . ° 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE . ° ° ° 


INDEX ry ° ° ° . ° . ° . 


PAGE 


168 


171 
186 
205 
222 
240 


209 


THE SURVIVAL VALUE 
OF CHRISTIANITY 





Chapter I 


THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


Ye men of Athens, I percewe that in all things ye are 
somewhat too reigious.—Paul 


1. ORTHODOXY BY LEGISLATION. 


N maRcH 21, 1925, the following became law 
O in the sovereign state of Tennessee: 

‘‘BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF 
THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, That it shall be unlawful 
for any teacher in any of the Universities, nor- 
mals or other public schools of the State which 
are supported in whole or in part by the public 
school funds of the State, to teach any theory 
which denies the story of the Divine Creation of 
man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead 
that man has descended from a lower order of 
animals. 

‘‘BE IT FURTHER ENACTED, That any teacher 
found guilty of the violation of this Act shall be 


guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction 
3 


4 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


shall be fined not less than One Hundred 
($100.00) Dollars for each offense.’’ 

This legislation resulted in the Scopes trial at 
Dayton, Tennessee, in July, 1925, a trial that 
attracted the attention of the civilized world. 

A bill forbidding the teaching of evolution in 
the state-supported schools under penalty of a 
heavy fine and imprisonment was introduced in 
1921 into the lower house of the Legislature of 
Kentucky and, only after a hot fight, defeated by 
a vote of 42 to 41. 

In the same year a rider was attached to an 
appropriation bill in the Senate of South Carolina 
providing that ‘‘no moneys appropriated for pub- 
lic education or for the maintenance and support 
of state-supported institutions shall be used or 
paid to any such school or institution teaching or 
permitting to be taught, as a creed to be followed, 
the cult known as ‘Darwinism.’’’ This did not 
become law. 

In the summer of 1925 a similar rider was at- 
tached to an appropriation bill in the Legislature 
of Georgia and defeated. 

In 1923 a joint resolution was passed by the 
Legislature of Florida stating that ‘‘it is im- 
proper and subversive of the best interests of 


WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? . 5 


the people of this state’? for any teacher in a 
state-supported institution ‘‘to teach or permit 
to be taught atheism, or agnosticism, or to teach 
as true Darwinism, or any other hypothesis that 
links man in blood relationship to any other 
form of life.’’ 

A similar resolution introduced into the lower 
house of the North Carolina Legislature in April, 
1925, was defeated by a vote of 64 to 47. In 
January, 1924, the governor of this state, at the 
suggestion of the High-School Textbook Com- 
mittee, caused to be stricken from the list of text- 
books available for use in the state two works on 
biology because the public press had alleged that 
they contained references to evolution. 


2. WHY FUNDAMENTALISM ? 


What inspires this attempt to enforce by legis- 
lation a uniformity of religious beliefs through- 
out the country? The answer is, Fundamentalism. 
What is Fundamentalism? For one group, whom 
Mr. H. L. Mencken represents, it is merely the 
religion of the Babbitts, which has suddenly added 
to its traditional obscurantism a militant pro- 
gram which it is trying to enforce by law. An- 


6 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


other group, for which one of the fuculty of an 
eastern university speaks, would dismiss Funda- 
mentalism as a futile posthumous revival of is- 
sues settled long ago. For the Liberal, who bears 
the brunt of the Fundamentalists’ attack, it is a 
struggle for power and control within the various 
Protestant denominations. Yet in reality the 
Fundamentalist movement is more than all this. 
It is a revolt of traditional Protestant orthodoxy 
against the spirit of modern culture. It is a sort 
of counter-revolutionary trend initiated by con- 
temporary American medievalists to stem the 
tide of the revolution in life and thought effected 
by the two great engines of modern culture, de- 
mocracy and science. Fundamentalism challenges 
the moral and spiritual values of modern civili- 
zation. 

Fundamentalism and the Ku Klux Klan have 
much in common. Both profited immensely from 
the post-war fears which stampeded so many men 
and women back to ancient loyalties. The one 
hundred per cent Americanism of the Klan finds 
its parallel in one hundred per cent orthodoxy. 
Both movements, while apparently assuming a na- 
tional significance since the war, have their roots 
in the past. The Klan is the logical continuation 


WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? ‘4 


of habits of thought and feeling that found expres- 
sion in the Knownothingism of the middle, and 
the American Protective Association of the close, 
of the last century when the native American 
Protestants came into conflict with the prevail- 
ingly Roman Catholic alien immigrants. Simi- 
larly Fundamentalism is an attempt by the tra- 
ditional orthodox element within the various 
Protestant denominations to preserve its tradi- 
tions and identity in opposition to the rise of 
modern culture which is creeping into the school 
in the guise of evolution and into the church as 
Liberalism. 

The Klan is prevailingly a small-town move- 
ment and fails signally to gain any foothold 
within the larger cities and the industrial centers. 
The stronghold of Fundamentalism is found like- 
wise in the small towns and countryside where 
the intellectual and religious life has been least 
affected by modern culture. Fundamentalism is 
strongest in rural communities. Tennessee, with 
its famous Fundamentalist anti-evolution law, is 
seventy-five per cent rural. In all that vast region 
stretching from Virginia to Texas and Oklahoma, 
together with a large section of the Middle and 

1See Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan, Ch. V. 


8 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


Far West, the rural population far outnumbers 
the urban. Urban leaders in politics, education 
or religion are at the mercy of the rural mind. 
The ‘‘cultural lag’’ of the countryside is a famil- 
iar fact of history. ‘‘Pagan,’’ a word derived 
from pagus, country, was the term applied by 
the early Christian church to idolaters, since the 
villagers, being those most remote from the cities 
and centers of Christian culture, were the last to 
adopt Christianity. The Klan and Fundamental- 
ism are alike, finally, in their tendency to appeal 
to ‘‘direct action.’? The Klan seeks through its 
mask and clandestine political combinations to 
coerce men and women into one hundred per cent 
Americanism. The Fundamentalists, on a some- 
what higher level, are seeking through legislation 
to combat science and to compel the people of a 
free country to retain the orthodox faith. It 
was hardly an accident that on his death Mr. 
Bryan was proclaimed as the greatest of all the 
Klansmen. 

In great states such as Tennessee and North 
Carolina, where rapid strides are being made in 
education, the state universities and high schools 
have outstripped the masses of the people, who 
distrust and fear the newfangled ideas of science 


WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? 9 


which they do not understand. The attitude of 
an influential element in this area is well ex- 
pressed in the following statement of a religious 
leader who is by no means a rabid Fundamen- 
talist: | 
‘Tt is an uprising of parents that they are 
having in North Carolina. ... A few days ago, 
while I was a guest in one of the most devout 
Christian homes I have ever known, I saw a boy 
of twelve with a booklet which had in it a series 
of grotesque-looking pictures of what somebody 
imagined prehistoric man looked like. One page 
gave a landscape purporting to show how the 
earth looked one hundred million years ago. 
After that there was a paragraph telling how life 
began in the world. Here are a few lines of it: 
‘¢¢Close your eyes and think of some muddy 
cutter or frog pond full of stagnant water with a 
scorching sun glittering down on the green slime 
which floats among the bulrushes and swamp 
weeds. Those cesspools, geologists tell us, were 
the cradle of life on earth. This life, called alge, 
was a very low form of plant composed of a jelly- 
like mass which floated on the stale, slimy, black 
water of the primitive swamps. Step by step 
scientists follow the evolution of this low, simple 


10 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


plant into a soft, boneless creature, resembling a 
piece of liver, composed of a single life-cell .. .’ 
‘This is a sample of the stuff some of our 
children are getting. No wonder that Christian 
people are rising up all over the land and saying 
that this sort of thing has gone far enough... . 
If our views of the separation of Church and 
State make it impossible to teach Christianity 
in our public institutions, they should make it 
equally impossible for any teacher to sneer at 
Christianity and to teach views that are anti- 
Christian. Our teachers ought to have the sense 
and the decency to see this, and we believe that 
the great majority of them do see it. If they fail 
to see it, then it may become necessary to forbid 
them to teach anti-Christian views and theories. 
It is a poor rule that does not work both ways.’’? 
We have here the protest of an outraged and 
ignorant piety—outraged because it is ignorant 
—against the conclusions of science. Such a mind 
would prefer the fictions of the first chapters of 
Genesis or the theological speculations of the 
Middle Ages to the approved findings of the pa- 
tient, unprejudiced scientist. From the veiled 
threat at the close of this statement, there is not 
2The Presbyterian of the South, March 4, 1925. 


WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? 11 


the slightest: doubt that where the alternatives 
are offered of loyalty to Genesis or loyalty to the 
tested conclusions of the laboratory, this mind 
would elect the former. To assert that life did 
not originate as the old Hebrew writers imagined, 
is ‘‘irreligion’’ and ‘‘anti-Christianity.’’ Here 
we have the heart of the Fundamentalist chal- 
lenge. It disputes the right of science to any 
autonomy or finality within its own sphere. The 
conclusions of science are always threatened by 
the charge that they are ‘‘anti-Christian.’’ 

It is significant that the following rebuke of 
this pious obscurantism is not from an ungodly 
scientist nor yet from a heretical Liberal, but 
from a Roman Catholic, Lord Acton, the late 
learned historian of Cambridge University: 

‘(Whatever diverts government and science 
from their own spheres, or leads religion to usurp 
their domains, confounds distinct authorities and 
imperils not only political right and scientific 
truths, but also the cause of faith and morals. ... 
A science that for the sake of protecting faith 
wavers and dissembles in the pursuit of knowl- 
edge is an instrument at least as well adapted 
to serve the cause of falsehood as to combat it. 
... A discovery may be made m science, which 


12 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


will shake the faith of thousands, yet religion 
cannot refute it or object to it’? (italics the 
author’s). 

The enunciation of Galileo’s heliocentric as- 
tronomy shook the faith of the man of the Middle 
Ages far more than evolution has jarred modern 
orthodoxy. Orthodox religion objected most vig- 
orously and tried to refute this ‘‘anti-Christian’’ 
doctrine of science; it ended by doing the only 
thing it could do, accepting it. 


3. THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION IN AMERICAN LIFE. 


A prominent New York paper, commenting 
upon Fundamentalism, says: ‘‘What we are wit- 
nessing in America today is an organized at- 
tempt at the domination of politics through cer- 
tain theological sects. The plain truth is that 
the illiberal churches have gone into polities and 
have either terrorized the politicians or seduced 
them with the offer of votes.’’ 

The militant leaders of orthodox Protestant- 
ism have apparently lost all faith in the power 
of that sweet charity which they are supposed 
to preach, a charity that ‘‘is not puffed up, doth 
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 13 


is not easily provoked, . . . rejoiceth in the truth; 
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all 
thing's, endureth all things.’’ There is something 
paradoxical, not to say absurdly grotesque, in 
the spectacle of a faith, claiming the support of 
an infallible divine revelation, and yet appealing 
to the weak arm of human law to save it from 
destruction. 

More amazing still is the fact that, among a 
people whose historic boast is religious freedom 
and tolerance, orthodox Protestantism is able to 
assume a truculent and tyrannical attitude with- 
out a parallel in any other great nation. 

This is illustrated by the following ten reso- 
lutions adopted by the ministerial association of 
Charlotte, North Carolina, in April, 1925. 

‘<Tn view of certain reported conditions in some 
of our state educational institutions in regard to 
antagonism to the fundamental religious truth 
held by the great body of the people of the com- 
monwealth the ministerial association of Char- 
lotte, an organization comprising the ministers 
of all the denominations of the city, adopts the 
following: 

**1, Since God is the author of the Book of 
Nature as well as of the Book of Inspiration, 


14 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


there can be no conflict between true science and 
the Bible. Evolution in the sense that man has 
been evolved from a lower order of creatures is 
not a scientific fact, but merely a theory [the 
American Association for the Advancement of 
Science with 14,300 members has stated, ‘‘No sci- 
entific generalization is more strongly supported 
by thoroughly tested evidences than is that of or- 
ganic evolution’’]; and we are uncompromisingly 
opposed to the teaching of this theory as a fact 
in our state schools, denominational schools, or 
anywhere else. Most cordially, however, do we 
welcome the findings of true science [that is, sei- 
ence sanctioned by the Fundamentalists]. 

‘<2. We would most strongly urge the citizens 
of North Carolina to be very careful in the selec- 
tion of persons who shall represent us in the legis- 
lature; see to it that, touching all vital questions, 
we are honestly represented. 

‘*3. That said legislators be very careful and 
discriminating in the choice of trustees of our 
state educational institutions. 

‘‘4. That a more rigid censorship be exercised 
in the selection of text-books to be used in our 
state-owned schools. 

‘5. That said trustees use all possible care and 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 15 


discrimination in the choice of presidents and 
teachers in the aforementioned institutions. 

‘*6. When the fact has been established that 
any president or teacher of our tax-supported 
schools is inculeating theories which tend to unset- 
tle or destroy the faith of our boys and girls in 
the Old and New Testaments as the inspired 
Word of God, that such officer or teacher be 
promptly removed from his position. | 

“7, That it is greatly to be deplored that when 
some state institutions become large in numbers 
and resources that they become more arrogant 
in spirit and the officers and teachers lose sight 
of the fact that they are the servants of the people 
and not their masters. 

““8, We are emphatically opposed to the pub- 
lication of any paper or magazine by our state 
institutions which tends to create an immoral at- 
mosphere and which involves a denial of the in- 
spiration and integrity of the Scriptures as the 
Word of God.’ 


3A reference to the Journal of Social Forces, published under 
the auspices of the University of North Carolina. In a widely cir- 
culated pamphlet, entitled Anti-Ohristian Sociology, Rev. William 
P. McCorkle of Burlington, North Carolina, brands this excellent 
journal as “atheistic,” “agnostic,” “anti-Christian,” etc., and gives 
the impression that a non-Christian sociologist is “ipso facto, an 
apostle of unbelief, the class in sociology a school of infidelity, 
and the text-books and periodicals used as auxiliary to the course 


16 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


‘‘9, That in our unalterable determination to 
make our state institutions safe places for our 
boys and girls we call upon the good citizens of 
North Carolina to join us in a fight to the finish. 
The victory for truth and right must be won if 
it takes years to achieve it. Shall we, the people, 
especially the parents of North Carolina, tamely 
submit to taxation for the establishment and 
maintenance of schools whose instruction and in- 
fluence tend to ruin our children? Shall we 
through ignorance or indifference elect persons 
to represent us in the legislature who will advo- 
cate the appropriation of state funds to the sup- 
port of such schools? In our deliberate judgment 
it is high time for our people to wake up to a 
realization of the subtle dangers which beset our 
boys and girls. 

‘*10. The ministerial association of Charlotte 
respectfully requests the papers of the state to 
publish the foregoing resolutions.’’ 

In May, 1925, the Southern Baptist Convention, 
speaking for the largest Protestant denomination 


the seed and stimuli of Ingersollism.” One wonders whether the 
real trouble is not due to the fact that sociologists, among others, 
have crept into an orthodox Eden and given men to eat of the 
forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. For intellectual curi- 
yee the God of the Fundamentalist damned the major part of 
the race. 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 17 


in the South, said, ‘‘ We protest against the impo- 
sition of this theory [evolution] on the minds of 
our children in denominational or public schools 
as if it were a definite and established truth of 
science.’? Many other similar denunciations of 
evolution in Fundamentalist bodies, North and 
South, might be quoted, but this suffices to indi- 
cate the extent of this movement. 

It would be hard to find anywhere a document 
more bigoted or more brutally insulting to the 
open-minded than the ten resolutions of the Char- 
lotte ministerial association quoted above. There 
is in these resolutions a tone of aggressive holi- 
ness, a tang of moral ruthlessness and haughty 
intolerance that makes one wonder whether we 
are not to find within orthodox Protestantism 
some of the most unlovely and at the same time 
unchristian phases of modern life. This entire 
Fundamentalist controversy has been character- 
ized by a bitterness, a theological blood-lust, and 
an intellectual indecency that make one almost 
despair of the future of the church. 

It was just such an attitude on the part of an 
intrenched and bigoted church in the eighteenth 
century that created a Voltaire and gave him his 
slogan, Ecrasez l’infame. What is the history 


18 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


of this attempt at religious tyranny in American 
life and how are we to explain it? 

Much of the bitterness of the Fundamentalist 
movement must be attributed to the tortures of 
wounded pride. The Fundamentalist surrenders 
reluctantly the unchallenged authority which or- 
thodox Protestantism has held since colonial days 
among the American masses. Of the four great 
avenues through which the spirit of man ap- 
proaches the ultimate issues of life, namely, sci- 
ence, philosophy, art, and religion, it is religion 
which from the beginning has occupied the stra- 
tegic position in the higher loyalties of Ameri- 
cans. The reasons for this are found primarily 
in the history of American society. Many inter- 
ests undoubtedly influenced men to come to Amer- 
ica, but next to the imperative pressure of eco- 
nomic needs, religion was strongest. Religion, 
moreover, of all the higher interests of men, was 
most easily transplanted to the wilderness. Sci- 
ence, art, and philosophy presuppose a more or 
less mature culture. Science requires for its suc- 
cessful cultivation expensive laboratories, tested 
methods of research, and a disinterested love of 
the truth. Such agencies and such a mental atti- 
tude were not encouraged by life in the wilder- 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 19 


ness. All forms of art presuppose a more or less 
matured and self-conscious social order, a sense 
of social values, possibilities for leisure and an 
intensive humanistic atmosphere not found in 
America during colonial days nor during the 
period of westward expansion when a pioneer de- 
mocracy was harnessing the forces of nature and 
laying the material bases of American culture. 
Philosophy is even slower in maturing than sci- 
ence and art, as it presupposes a rich and ripe 
social and individual experience over which the 
speculative imagination may freely play in the 
eternal search for the ultimate meaning of life. 
As Hegel has remarked, it is only at twilight that 
the owl of Minerva takes her flight. Aristotle, 
in whom the philosophy of Greece culminated, 
was the teacher of Alexander, who wiped out the 
political independence of Greece and introduced 
the period of slow decline known as Hellenism. 
Kant came as the ripe fruition of the intellectual 
turmoil of the eighteenth century enlightenment. 
Locke wrote with his mind crammed with the 
stirring memories of the Puritan Revolution. 
Jonathan Edwards, that curious blend of phi- 
losopher, mystic and saint, merely capitalized the 
long and intensive and barren wrestlings of the 


20 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


New England imagination with the inscrutable 
mysteries of Calvinism. 

Religion had no rivals in early America among 
the higher interests of men. She speedily pre- 
empted the legitimate spheres of science, educa- 
tion, art, and philosophy. They became her vas- 
sals. Even political status, as in Massachusetts 
colony, was conditioned upon church membership. 
In spite of our conventional claims to religious 
freedom and tolerance, orthodox religion has 
ruled the realm of higher loyalties among the 
American masses up to the close of the nineteenth 
century to a degree without parallel. One who 
would challenge this statement can find ample 
support for it if he will trace the history of lit- 
erature, the stage, education, or public morals in 
this country. 

The recent Fundamentalist protest against the 
teaching of evolution in state-supported schools is 
therefore merely a reassertion, in parts of the 
country least affected by modern culture, of the 
old traditional role of spiritual dictator which or- 
thodox religion has long played at the higher 
levels of American life. In the light of history, 
one must be somewhat charitable towards the im- 
potent sputterings of our ancient spiritual over- 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 21 


lord, as he sees the reins slipping from his hands. 
He feels that Israel has gone a-whoring after 
strange gods. 

The dominance of religion in the higher life 
of Americans is intimately associated with the 
nation’s struggle of a hundred years and more 
with the forces of nature as it pushed the pio- 
neer line slowly westward and carved out the 
material form of a great civilization. This pe- 
riod of unrestricted competition in exploiting 
natural resources, with its isolated, independent 
and ignorant pioneer democracy, shaped Ameri- 
can character as nothing else has done. ‘The 
frontier has registered itself in the American 
mind in ‘‘its restlessness, its preoccupation with 
the practical, its lack of interest in the esthetical 
and the philosophical, its desire for ends and 
neglect of means, its preference of cleverness to 
training, its self-confidence, its individualism, and 
its extreme provinciality.’?* The pioneer’s lack 
of intellectual contacts made him singularly con- 
servative and timorous in religion. As a result, 
‘“Where people have grown up under frontier 
conditions, they have fixed opinions in theology, 
opinions that have been received traditionally and 

4J,T. Adams, The Founding of New England, p. 176. 


22 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


retained unchanged from frontier days. ... The 
farther West one goes, where frontier influence 
still more strongly abides, the more decidedly con- 
servative church people appear to be in their 
theology and the more responsive to primitive and 
provincial ideus.’’® 

The pioneers, furthermore, inherited highly de- 
veloped systems of theology, of which Calvinism 
is typical. With little intellectual training or in- 
terest, and with few or no influences in his daily 
way of life that would lead him to challenge this 
theology, the pioneer surrendered to it abjectly 
with the result that in vast areas of this country, 
especially in the West and Southwest, least re- 
moved from pioneer conditions, the mental stereo- 
types of orthodox Protestantism still dominate 
men’s religious imaginations. This is the secret 
of the strength of Fundamentalism in these areas. 

When to this fact we add another, namely, that 
Fundamentalism is ‘‘the Religion of a Book,’’ and 
when we realize that an intense, almost pathologi- 
cal piety tends to turn this Book into a fetish, we 
are in a position, perhaps, to appreciate the ter- 
rible force of the Fundamentalists’ alternatives, 
either the Bible or Darwin, the son of God or 

5H. K. Rowe, History of Religion in the United States, p. 88. 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 23 


the son of an ape. Macaulay, in his essay on 
Milton, speaks of ‘‘the despotism of the imagina- 
tion over uncultivated minds.’’ There are mil- 
lions of Americans for whom the poetic religious 
imagery of the ancient Hebrews still gives the 
last word, not only in morals and religion, but 
also in science. 

The religion of the frontier, and hence that of 
orthodox Protestantism today, is primarily re- 
vivalistic and emotional. It is a religion that ap- 
peals to the heart rather than to the head. The 
history of American Protestantism during the 
first half of the last century is a history of an 
almost incessant turmoil of revivals, often ac- 
companied by extreme emotional excesses. This 
revivalistic emphasis was continued by Finney, 
Moody, Chapman, and others, and has reached a 
sort of fin de siécle florescence in the Rev. Billy 
Sunday. 

Revivalism was perhaps an inevitable out- 
growth of the peculiar conditions of the isolated 
frontier life; and it undoubtedly had its value as 
an agency of moral reform and social solidarity. 
But revivalism has also helped to strengthen the 
dictatorship of religion over the higher life of 
Americans. Orthodox Protestantism exploits the 


24 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


feelings. It does not teach men to think on 
religious matters. It discourages independent 
thought and subordinates the intellect to the emo- 
tions. Criticism and doubt are deadly to faith. 
Where a people have been educated to feel rather 
than to think, they become the easy prey of the 
controversialist or the religious mountebank who 
ean skillfully play upon their religious prejudices. 

This throws light upon the peculiarly discour- 
aging nature of religious movements such as 
Fundamentalism. We have to deal with men and 
women who have never been taught to use their 
heads on religious matters. Effects of this anti- 
rationalistic, revivalistic religion are widely evi- 
dent in American life. They appear in the head- 
long, uncritical, Crusader spirit with which Prot- 
estantism has championed prohibition and lent 
itself to moral tyranny. They are felt in the igno- 
rant and bitter antagonism with which Funda- 
mentalist leaders have challenged the conclusions | 
of our modern culture. What are the results of 
such a mental attitude? ‘‘When theologians,”’ 
says Lecky, ‘‘during a long period have incul- 
cated habits of credulity, rather than habits of 
enquiry; when they have persuaded men that it is 
better to cherish prejudice than to analyze it; bet- 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 25 


ter to stifle every doubt of what they have been 
taught than honestly to investigate its value, they 
will at last succeed in forming habits of mind that 
will instinctively and habitually recoil from all 
impartiality and intellectual honesty. If men con- 
tinue to violate a duty they may at last cease to 
feel its obligation.’’ ° 

The emotionalism of orthodox Protestantism is 
responsible for the blind appeal to authority and 
submission to the dictates of religious dogma. It 
has made it difficult, not to say impossible, for 
Fundamentalist leaders and their docile followers 
to adjust themselves to a new age. The situa- 
tion is a tragic one, and yet the fault cannot be 
laid at the door of modern culture. 

Revivalism in America has served religious tyr- 
anny in another, more subtle, fashion. We know 
well that ideas or doctrines that have been tinged 
with strong emotions, that are embalmed as it 
were in powerful sentiment, take on a reality 
and an authority in the minds of men entirely in- 
dependent of the actual truth of these ideas or 
doctrines. The classical examples of this are 
found in cases of conversion such as those of 
Paul on the way to Damascus and of Augustine 


6 Lecky, History of European Morals, I, 101. 


26 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


in the garden in Milan, or in the experiences of 
the great mystics. The immediate and engross- 
ing reality of the emotional experience suffuses 
the ideas associated with this experience and 
serves to fix them in the mind. Revivalism, as 
is well known, bends all its efforts towards an 
emotional cataclysm known as conversion. Hven 
the saner forms of orthodox Protestantism agree 
with revivalism in that they seek to arouse feel- 
ings and not to satisfy the intellect. Once these 
powerful emotional effects are secured, the ideas 
that are the vehicles of these emotions become at 
once tinged with the vivid subjective reality of 
these emotions. Thus do ideas or dogmas become 
part of religious convictions not because they 
have been subjected to critical analysis but be- 
cause of the effect of the vivid emotional experi- 
ences with which they are associated. 

Any one, therefore, who seeks to attack these 
ideas from the point of view of reason is always 
at a disadvantage. The appeal of reason and 
the effect of criticism are always foiled by the 
irrational barrier of this emotional ‘‘set’’ that 
has been previously acquired. One holding a re- 
ligious belief acquired in this fashion is, indeed, 
usually unable to submit it to critical examina- 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 27 


tion. What has been acquired uncritically will 
be defended uncritically. The extreme discomfort 
of the mind trained in Fundamentalist habits of 
thought when faced with the critical method of 
science is perfectly intelligible. It is due to some- 
thing very like mental impotence, a sort of atro- 
phy of the critical powers superinduced by the 
long and unchallenged reign of a revivalist re- 
ligion that tends to make man a slave to his emo- 
tions. 

Perhaps the most powerful ally of religious 
tyranny, however, is the habit of mind encouraged 
by the radical democracy of the frontier life. 
This is suggested by the argument universally 
used by Mr. Bryan and his Fundamentalist fol- 
lowers in defense of their program for securing 
orthodoxy through legislation. That argument 
runs something as follows: 

‘<We tax ourselves to support schools and uni- 
versities. What is taught in those schools and 
universities must be taught in harmony with the 
beliefs and desires of the majority of the tax- 
paying citizens. Evolution contradicts the belief 
of this tax-paying majority that man, according 
to the inspired record of Genesis, was created 
out of the dust of the earth by the immediate 


28 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


fiat of the divine will. Therefore, evolution 
ought not to be taught in state-supported schools 
where the majority of the citizens are Funda- 
mentalist in faith and this Fundamentalist ma- 
jority has the right to pass legislation to enforce 
its will.’? 

Of course this same divinely inspired record 
teaches that the earth is flat, that witches exist 
and should be put to death, that it is wrong to lend 
money. It sanctions both slavery and polygamy. 
Consistency suggests that the Fundamentalists 
should include these matters in their legislative 
program. But for reasons that are perfectly ob- 
vious, if thoroughly illogical, they prefer to con- 
fine the issue to evolution versus Genesis. 

It is quite probable that a sovereign state such 
as Tennessee has a constitutional right to pass a 
futile and asinine anti-evolution law. The Con- 
stitution, within certain limits, permits both the 
state and the individual to play the fool, recog- 
nizing doubtless that this is part of the privileges 
and immunities of democracy. It is also perfectly 
obvious that when the ignorance and prejudice 
against evolution have been lived down in Ten- 
nessee, the law can be repealed. This is the only 
way in a democracy. 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 29 


What we are concerned with here, however, is 
something far more subtle and psychologically 
dangerous to the welfare of the community than 
the purely legal phase of the matter. We are 
concerned with a tendency, frequently remarked 
by the students of American democracy, to yield 
to the pronouncements of the majority on all mat- 
ters, even those of a special and scientific nature, 
as final and absolute. 

As Bryce remarks: ‘‘ When the number of voters 
is counted by many millions, the wings of imagi- 
nation droop, and the huge voting mass ceases 
to be thought of as merely so many individual 
human beings no wiser or better than one’s own 
neighbors. The phenomenon seems to pass into 
the category of the phenomena of nature, gov- 
erned by far-reaching and inexorable laws whose 
character science has only imperfectly ascer- 
tained, and which she can use only by obeying. 
It inspires a sort of awe, a sense of individual 
impotence, like that which one feels when he con- 
templates the majestic and eternal forces of the 
inanimate world. Such a feeling is even stronger 
when it operates, not on a cohesive minority which 
had lately hoped, or may yet hope, to become a 
majority, but on a single man or small group of 


30 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


persons cherishing some opinion which the mass 
disapproves.’’ ‘ 

In a pioneer democracy, moreover, old aristo- 
eratic groups have been eliminated and with them 
have gone those points of vantage from which 
differences of opinion and cultural outlook might 
find a voice. American democracy, unlike that of 
England, has no group set apart by birth or rank. 
A great public-school system facilitates the wide 
dissemination of a common body of ideas and a 
similarity of outlook that level the mental hori- 
zon. The center of gravity on higher issues, 
such as politics or religion, passes from the indi- 
vidual to the community and the nation enabling 
traditional religion to strengthen its tyrannical 
hold upon the masses. Orthodox religious ideas 
take on the fatalistic finality of mass opinion. 
Even those indifferent to orthodox religious be- 
liefs hesitate to criticize or oppose them because 
of ingrained fear of the tyranny of the majority. 
Thus religious beliefs once received and embodied 
in the popular mind, or the prevailing way of 
life, tend to take on in American democracy a 
certain absoluteness which is akin to the super- 
natural. 


7 Bryce, American Commonwealth, II, 348, 349, 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 31 


The situation in the case of religion is com- 
plicated by the fact that, from the very first, re- 
ligion in this country has not enjoyed the health- 
ful check of rival spheres of interest such as sci- 
ence, art, and philosophy, to the same extent as in 
Kurope. There were at first in America no great 
historic centers of learning, such as Cambridge 
and Oxford in England, the Sorbonne in Paris, 
and the ancient universities of Germany, dating 
often from the Middle Ages and always exercising 
a chastening influence upon religion. Institu- 
tions of higher learning in this country were from 
the very first the protégés of religion. As they 
grew in numbers and influence the transition to 
intellectual freedom has often been made only 
after severe struggles with orthodox religion, the 
scars of which are in many cases hardly healed. 
There are still large areas, especially in the 
West and Southwest, where state-supported in- 
stitutions of learning receive their patronage 
and funds upon the tacit understanding of a 
surrender to the tyrannical rule of a hard-boiled 
orthodoxy firmly intrenched in the social tradi- 
tions of the community. There have been few 
things more humiliating in the history of the in- 
tellectual life of America than the recent spec- 


32 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


tacle of heads of great state universities appear- 
ing hat in hand before Fundamentalist legisla- 
tures, pleading for the right to teach evolution in 
their classrooms. 

The unpardonable sin, therefore, that the lead- 
ers of Fundamentalism have committed against 
the moral and intellectual integrity of the nation 
is that they have stooped to exploit the fatalistic 
authority of this uncritical popular sentiment in 
support of their case. They realize that ideas 
gain power over the imaginations of men in Amer- 
ican democracy, not in proportion to the extent 
to which they have been subjected to critical re- 
view and evaluation, but directly in proportion 
to the extent to which they have been accepted 
by the masses. They realize only too well that 
the average individual, including many college 
professors and college presidents, is filled with 
instinctive terror at the very suggestion of defy- 
ing these accepted beliefs of the masses on re- 
ligion. They know that, where there has been a 
general impregnation of the minds of men with 
a given set of religious beliefs, they have ready 
for use a weapon which in American democ- | 
racy can be wielded with incalculable power to 
crush the heretic or to pry loose from a posi- 


THE. TYRANNY OF RELIGION 33 


tion of influence ‘‘ungodly”’ scientists who may 
be spreading ‘‘unchristian’’ theories as to the na- 
ture and origin of man. 

Tocqueville, who possibly more than any other 
critic grasped the spirit of American democracy, 
once remarked, ‘‘That democracy has spiritual- 
ized violence.’’ That is to say, American democ- 
racy has substituted for the rack and the fag- 
got and the halter the invisible spiritual weapon 
of an intolerant and uncompromising majority 
opinion with which to bludgeon the non-con- 
formist into submission. Had Tocqueville writ- 
ten with the rise of Fundamentalism and its anti- 
evolution crusade before him, he could hardly 
have written more truly. 

The sponsors of this tyranny, under the flag 
of Fundamentalism, would do well to consider 
the possibility of an ‘‘anticlerical’’ movement in 
this country similar to that in France. The Prot- 
estant ministry here have so far enjoyed the sym- 
pathy and confidence of all classes. They are 
thoroughly American in tradition and outlook. 
The great Protestant sects such as the Baptist 
and Presbyterian were forced at first to cham- 
pion religious freedom to gain a foothold in this 
country. The orthodox Protestant minister has, 


84 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


to be sure, largely lost the position of cultural 
and intellectual leadership enjoyed in days past. 
But the average minister is still considered a 
power for righteousness, and because of his moral 
sincerity, men overlook the fact that his zeal is 
often characterized by more heat than light. Can 
Protestantism afford to betray its great tradi- 
tions and sacrifice the confidence and traditional 
good will of the cultured and progressive ele- 
ments in the nation by yielding to Fundamental- 
ism? | 

There is something exceedingly disconcerting 
in the taunt of the great Fundamentalist leader, 
Mr. Bryan, to his college audiences, ‘‘There are 
only two per cent of the population of the country 
who are college graduates, while the other ninety- 
eight per cent have souls.’’ Do the Fundamen- 
talists really wish to precipitate a fight to the 
finish between the representatives of culture and 
the forces making for religious obscurantism? 

If such is their intention it would be well for 
the Fundamentalists to study the results of the 
conflict between religious reaction and modern 
culture in France during the last century. De- 
mocracy and science in France have always been 


THE TYRANNY OF RELIGION 35 


faced by a sinister alliance of clericalism and 
ultramontanism with political reaction. Gam- 
betta’s war-cry during the struggles of the Third 
Republic, ‘‘Clericalism is the enemy,”’ still finds 
its echo in the recent fight between Herriot and 
the Vatican. Mediating movements like Catholic 
Modernism under Loisy, which strove to absorb 
the new knowledge and heal the breach between 
the church and modern culture, were blasted by 
the papal encyclical of 1907. The lines of theo- 
logical orthodoxy hardened. The cleavage be- 
tween the Church and modern culture widened. 
Today leaders of science in France no longer 
consider it worth their while to refute the dog- 
mas of the church. Orthodox theology has pur- 
chased immunity at the price of isolation and in- 
tellectual dry rot. French culture, on the other 
hand, because it has been forced to win its inde- 
pendence in constant conflict with an obdurate 
orthodoxy in unholy alliance with political re- 
action, is non-religious, not to say anti-religious. 
It has been schooled to look upon traditional 
Christianity as its deadliest enemy. In religious 
crises the liberty-loving bourgeoisie have always 
appealed to the Voltairian tradition which again 


86 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


and again has swept the intellectual life of 
France, stifling the tender flower of religious 
piety like a withering sirocco. 

Do the champions of Fundamentalism wish to 
incur the responsibility of creating in this country 
a bitter antagonism between religion and mod- 
ern culture similar to that in France? Do they 
wish science to take on a more and more irre- 
ligious tone? Can they contemplate with equa- 
nimity the possible rise of a situation in this 
country, parallel to that in France in 1830, when 
it was for months hardly safe for a priest to be 
seen on the streets of Paris in his clerical garb? 
It is no light thing to throw down the gauntlet 
to modern culture, distraught and discouraged 
though that culture has been because of the war. 
it will soon regain its poise and with the return 
of its old self-confidence it will not forget those 
who in the hour of its deepest humiliation and 
discouragement denounced its cherished achieve- 
ments and damned its dearest loyalties. The 
Fundamentalist movement is bound in the end 
to prove a boomerang. When the smoke of battle 
has cleared away and bitter antipathies have sub- 
sided with the revival of the spirit of tolerance, 
the hold of the Church upon the loyalty of intel- 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 37 


ligent men will not be strengthened by this un- 
fortunate squabble. 


4, THE HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM. 


As the tabernacle neared completion we are 
told that the Lord Jehovah said to Moses, ‘‘ Bring 
thou near unto thee Aaron thy brother... that 
he may minister unto me in the priest’s office... . 
And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron 
thy brother for glory and for beauty.’’ Only the 
‘‘wise-hearted’’ were to work on these garments. 
And chief among these garments was a ‘‘breast- 
plate of judgment’’ made of ‘‘gold, of blue, and 
purple and scarlet and fine twined linen’’ bearing 
four rows of stones set in gold, three stones to 
the row, and each bearing one of the names of 
the twelve tribes of Israel. ‘‘And Aaron,’’ we 
are told, ‘‘shall bear the names of the children of 
Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his 
heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place, for 
a memorial before Jehovah continually.’’ (Tx. 
ch. 28.) 

The tabernacle with its barbaric splendor of 
purple and gold and fine linen is gone forever. 
Aaron and his breastplate of judgment are re- 


88 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


ligious memories. But the holy of holies still 
persists in the hearts of men even in the midst of 
the hurly-burly of today. Who are the high 
priests entering that holy of holies now? How 
have they succeeded in reconciling our intimate 
religious hopes with the harsh demands of a world 
dominated by democracy and science? Have the 
‘‘wise-hearted’’ labored on their mental equip- 
ment so that they may bear the ‘‘breastplate of 
judgment’’ intelligently and successfully? How, 
in other words, are the ministry mediating be- 
tween religion and culture? 

One beautiful Sabbath morning in May the 
writer recently found himself in a town in the 
Southwest. Palmetto palms studded broad lawns 
of homes, the low porches of which were often 
festooned with roses. A mocking-bird caroled 
in the distance. There was in the air a sense 
of material prosperity and domestic peace, quite 
belied by a bitter controversy over the Klan which 
was rending the town. As the writer entered the 
leading Protestant church, a modern brick struc- 
ture not devoid of beauty, he was cordially wel- 
~comed and shown a seat. The church was packed 
with earnest, unsophisticated people for whom 
religion was evidently a vital matter. The pastor, 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 39 


an officer in the Ku Klux Klan and an enthu- 
siastic Fundamentalist, was short of stature 
with deep-set eyes behind huge tortoise-rimmed 
glasses. He looked the spiritual dictator and 
played the part well. Early in his discourse he 
made the sweeping statement that the teachers 
of our high schools and colleges are tinged with 
a scientific materialism which is undermining the 
faith of youth. This statement was received 
calmly by his audience of rural-minded folk, the 
tax-paying supporters of the town high school 
and the state university. Later he dismissed evo- 
lution with the amazing statement that all evo- 
lutionists are atheists. 

Were this an isolated or unusual occurrence it 
might be dismissed as of little significance. But 
it is safe to say that in three-fourths of the Prot- 
estant pulpits of that vast region and in other 
parts of this country similar prostitutions of 
the pulpit in the interest of obscurantism are 
taking place. One gains a decided first-hand im- 
pression while traveling through these regions 
that the organized attack upon science by such 
Fundamentalist leaders as Mr. Bryan has had 
other results than the so-called ‘‘monkey-bills”’ 
designed to forbid the teaching of evolution in 


40 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


state-supported schools. It has also aroused in 
the minds of tens of thousands of simple and 
unsophisticated people a deep distrust, not only 
of science, but of all forms of higher learning 
as inimical to faith and morals. In a democracy 
dependent upon an-informed and tolerant citizen- 
ship this is a serious situation and the responsi- 
bility rests squarely upon those who bear the 
‘‘breastplate of judgment’’ in these delicate mat- 
ters of faith, namely, the ministry. 

There is usually in these districts an absence — 
of other forces, intellectual or religious, that can 
be depended upon to correct such dangerous 
teachings. Throughout vast regions of this coun- 
try, which boasts of its public schools and demo- 
cratic enthusiasm for enlightenment, a condition 
prevails closely approximating some of the priest- 
ridden sections of Europe or of the countries to 
the south of us. La medtocrité fonde l’autorité. 
Where a people are ignorant and uncritically re- 
hgious even to the verge of superstition and 
where outstanding, informed, and independent- 
minded individuals are lacking, there we have 
the paradise of the priest. 

There is one minister to every 514 of the popu- 
lation of the United States. Out of 110 millions 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 41 


some 99 millions are members or adherents of 
churches. It will be seen at once that no other 
group can compare with the ministry in its op- 
portunity for shaping the higher loyalties of the 
American masses. What is the character of the 
men being selected for this most important task? 
Statistics show that more than half of our Prot- 
estant ministers come from the homes of farmers 
or of ministers. That is, more than half the men 
in the ministry come from parts of the community 
that are frequently unenlightened and uniformly 
conservative in religious matters. 

These men usually go to a denominational 
school or directly to the seminary of their faith. 
In the denominational school they are safe- 
guarded from contaminating phases of modern 
culture, especially in science. They get a Pres- 
byterianized biology or a Methodistized geology. 
They are not taught to cultivate the free critical 
attitude so necessary to leadership in our modern 
life. Once safely within the walls of the seminary 
this spiritual inbreeding is completed by an inten- 
sive process of vocationalization. Thus by means 
of the home that shapes them during childhood 
and adolescence, the denominational academy and 
college, and finally the seminary, a pitch of de- 


42 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


nominational-mindedness is achieved that ap- 
proaches the organic in its thoroughness. Fun- 
damentalism becomes as integral a part of the 
minister as the color is part of the fabric of the 
oriental rug. For a man, subjected to such train- 
ing, to question his: faith is almost as impossible 
as to stop the course of his blood-stream. There 
are, of course, liberal-minded ministers to be 
found even in the remote villages, but they are 
a small minority, for perfectly obvious reasons. 

What training do these men get in their semi- 
naries? Are those ‘‘wise-hearted’’ who prepare 
them for their task of bearing the ‘‘breastplate 
of judgment’’? The conclusion of a recent thor- 
ough investigation of theological education is, 
‘«Since most of the seminaries are expected to in- 
terpret the genius, and to train men to interpret 
the genius, of a certain denomination, the ma- 
chinery of control is constructed with a view to 
securing this result.’?& The seminaries with some 
few notable exceptions train leaders for their de- 
nominations. That is, they train men to defend 
and to perpetuate a certain set of theological dog- 
mas. This is vastly important for an understand- 


§R. L. Kelly, Theological Education in America, p. 33. 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 43 


ing of the seminaries as educational institutions. 
They are not, like our great universities and sci- 
entific foundations, laboratories in which men seek 
the truth for its own sake, independent of creed or 
sect. The seminaries train special pleaders; they 
seek those skilled in the defense of a truth that 
has already been gained through divine revela- 
tion. Hxcept in the few liberal seminaries, in- 
tellectual conformity is always implied. Some 
even boast of this. ‘‘No seminary in any church,”’ 
Says one prospectus, ‘‘has a history more conspic- 
uous for soundness in the faith, requires and 
enforces from its professors stricter vows of con- 
formity in the teaching of the system of doctrine 
found in the unamended standards of the Presby- 
terian Church in the United States and has in its 
charter and constitution more effective steps by 
which, if any departure from orthodoxy should 
ever take place, immediate and effective redress 
may be had at will by the General Assembly of 
our Church.’’ 

The extreme of intellectual subservience is at- 
tained in the catalogue of another seminary: 
‘‘Hivery student shall, in the presence of the Fac- 
ulty, subscribe to a written declaration ... that 


44 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


he will not propagate any opinion in opposition 
to the principles of the United Presbyterian 
Church.”’ 

In pleasing contrast to this is the policy of 
the Divinity School of Chicago: ‘‘It is necessary 
that the Divinity School be conducted in accord- 
ance with the methods and ideals of the Univer- 
sity in which is included freedom of teaching on 
the part of the instructors.’? The Harvard Di- 
vinity School has a similar provision. 

There are in these schools of the prophets 
many teachers of rare scholarship with reputa- 
ble earned degrees, but they are in the minority. 
It is the investigator’s conclusion that in most 
of the seminaries the ‘‘faculty members possess 
few qualifications besides personal piecty’’ and 
the long string of degrees they boast are hon- 
orary, the gift often of insignificant denomina- 
tional colleges. Out of 123 American seminaries 
forty-two per cent have fewer than five full-time 
instructors. Under such conditions the standards 
of scholarship are low, much lower than those of 
the schools of law and medicine. Only 16 out 
of 123 seminaries require a college degree for 
admission and one seminary of a large Protestant 
denomination, having an enrollment of 503, men- 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 45 


tions no requirements for admission whatever. 
Most significant for the educational product of 
the seminary is that, with a few exceptions, the 
seminary stands isolated from the great streams 
of culture. The seminaries are unrelated to each 
other as a group of professional schools and they 
are ‘‘virtually untouched by the progress and 
methods of science.’’ 

What are the products of these schools of the 
prophets? Obviously they will not be scholars, 
nor can they have any deep insight into life’s 
complexities. The two things stressed in a theo- 
logical education seem to be ‘‘goodness’’ or 
‘‘niety’’ and ‘‘sound doctrine.’? With rare ex- 
ceptions piety is preferred to scholarship and in- 
tellectual adventurousness. Seminary students 
are not usually admitted on the basis of scholar- 
ship. Their training does not presuppose fa- 
miliarity with science, a knowledge of history, 
psychology and philosophy, or the attainment of 
critical habits of thought. Yet the minister, by the 
logic of events, must be a leader. People look to 
him for guidance in that uncharted realm where 
religion and modern culture mingle. He is or- 
dained to preach the truth even though in so do- 
ing he ‘‘robs the altar of its sacrifice and the 


46 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


priest of his mysteries.’? In the language of 
Matthew Arnold, he is to make ‘‘the truth and 
the will of God prevail.’’ He is to undertake this 
mighty task in an age confounded by a welter of 
facts dug up by the scientist and a maze of ideals 
thrust upon the people by revolutionist and re- 
former. 

The minister’s task today is one of creation. 
He must help men to re-think their world. He 
of all the community has resting upon him the 
imperative ‘‘moral obligation to be intelligent.’’ 
This demand for intellectual leadership need not 
be incompatible with goodness. The goodness of 
the seminary comes too easily. It is based upon 
an easy-going acceptance of the faith of the 
fathers, and upon the naive assumption that this 
faith suffices unaltered for the solution of all this 
world’s problems. The intellectual basis of this 
goodness is ‘‘sound doctrine.’’ This is a naive 
point of view worthy of the monk living in his 
cell True goodness comes only through intel- 
lectual adventurousness; it is not an exotic 
reared in the hothouse of sheltered orthodoxy. 
Socrates taught long ago that moral integrity 
is gained only by straight thinking and that 
straight thinking is impossible without critical 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 47 


thinking. Goodness based upon orthodoxy may 
be thoroughly amiable, but it is not the goodness 
that offers inspiration and guidance to men tread- 
ing untrodden paths. If the orthodox minister 
today is more or less of a moral asset to the 
community, he is also more or less of an intel- 
lectual liability. He tends to become, often quite 
against his will, a high priest of obscurantism. 
One is reminded in this connection of Lord 
Morley’s characterization of the ministry ef the 
Church of England the middle of last century: 
‘‘Her ministers vow almost before they have 
erossed the threshold of manhood that they will 
search no more. They virtually swear that they 
will to the end of their days believe what they 
believe then, before they have had time either 
to think or to know the thoughts of others. If 
they can not keep this solemn promise, they have 
at least every inducement that ordinary human 
motives can supply, to conceal their breach of 
it. The same system that begins by making men- 
tal indolence a virtue and intellectual narrowness 
a part of sanctity, ends by putting a premium 
on something too like hypocrisy. Consider the 
seriousness of fastening up in these bonds some 
thousands of members of the most instructed and 


48 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


intelligent classes in the country, the very men 
who would otherwise be best fitted from position 
and opportunities for aiding a little in the long, 
difficult, and plainly inevitable task of transform- 
ing opinion. Consider the waste of intelligence, 
and what is assuredly not less grave, the positive 
dead weight and thick obstruction, by which an 
official hierarchy so organized must paralyze men- 
tal independence in a community.’’ ® 

It may be replied that the average minister is 
not and can never be an impartial expositor 
of science. He is the pastor of a flock whose 
spiritual, not intellectual or cultural, interests 
have been committed to his care. Furthermore, 
he is a devout and loyal member of a denomina- 
tion, Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian, and has 
sworn to be faithful to that denomination’s dog- 
mas. His church, through its official declara- 
tions, has condemned evolution as anti-religious. 
What alternative has he to condemning evolu- 
tion and all the other tenets of science which his 
church suspects as dangerous? Here is perhaps 
the most difficult phase of the whole question. 
The minister is indeed a special pleader; he 
preaches a doctrine which he must not deny nor 


9John Morley, On Compromise, p. 26. 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 49 


even criticize. Where that dogma tends to con- 
demn science, he must yield his critical judgment, 
if he has any, to the superior will of his church. 
The church thus places its ministers where they 
may be compelled to stultify their intelligence, 
or brave a trial for heresy, or leave the church. 
This situation is unfortunate for the individual 
minister, for the church, and for the community 
of which he is the spiritual guide. 

Time was when the church was strong enough 
to exact conformity from all. Quakers and Bap- 
tists were dealt with rather summarily under the 
God-fearing Puritan theocracy of New England. 
Today, thanks to the spread and influence of 
modern culture, such tyranny is impossible. The 
result is that conformity is exacted only in the 
pulpit. This latitude for the pew but not for the 
pulpit has curious results. The minister who does 
not dare dictate the beliefs of his congregation is 
bitterly intolerant of divergent beliefs in his fel- 
low ministers. The same minister who threatens 
his unorthodox fellow minister with a trial for 
heresy does not object to the same unorthodox 
ideas if held by ministers of another denomina- 
tion. But what is the sense of unfrocking a 
brother minister for doctrines which endanger the 


50 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


souls of men when these imperiled souls have 
only to cross the street to hear these dangerous 
doctrines preached freely? 

Furthermore, it may be asked, if heresy is so 
dangerous in one’s own sect that it must be 
crushed, why not call upon the arm of civil law to 
put down heresy? Error is error and truth is 
truth, whether in one’s own sect or outside it. 
Why be so bitter towards the heretic in one’s own 
sect and so tolerant of one outside that sect? 
Is it for the love of truth as truth or is it because 
we have the heretic in our own orthodox sect 
within our power, while the outsider is beyond 
our grasp? 

Assuming that our zeal in unfrocking our un- 
orthodox fellow minister is prompted solely by 
a love for the truth, then we must look favorably 
upon the unfrocking of all ministers in all other 
churches whose doctrines differ from ours. Sup- 
pose this is carried out so successfully that all 
whom we call heretics are disposed of and all 
religious leaders are made to bow the knee to our 
dogmas. What then becomes of religious liberty? 
Are we to conclude that religious liberty can ex- 
ist only where there is error, and that when the 
truth prevails religious liberty ceases? Or does 


HIGH PRIESTS OF OBSCURANTISM 51 


religious liberty imply an admission that there is 
no absolute and infallible truth in religion? 

The existence of freedom in the pew beside the 
bondage in the pulpit creates a gap between pul- 
pit and pew, and thus a problem for the Funda- 
mentalist. The layman is free in his judgments 
and can adjust his beliefs in harmony with sci- 
ence. He can listen critically to what science 
has to say for evolution and what his Funda- 
mentalist minister says against it and then draw 
his own conclusions. The minister has no such 
freedom. If the minister finds that the doctrines 
he once promised to believe and preach are not 
in harmony with science, he may do one of two 
things. He may dissemble his change of mind 
and continue to give external conformity while 
inwardly dissenting, or he may be honest with 
himself, sacrifice his position and his professional 
training, and at great inconvenience, not to men- 
tion possible opprobrium and misunderstanding, 
he may leave the ministry. 

The psychological effect of this condition of 
affairs upon the ministry is most unfortunate. 
It encourages equivocation and subterfuge by the 
liberally inclined which his conservative associate 
rightly resents, It leads to men of bigoted faith 


52 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


being selected for conservative pulpits or else 
men innocuous and amiable, who can survive 
in positions intolerable to independent thinkers. 
What is even worse, perhaps, it tends to discredit, 
in the mind of the intelligent and cultured lay- 
man, the intellectual leadership, and even the 
mental candor, of the ministry. 


5. THE ISSUE. 


Beneath the theological billingsgate of the con- 
troversialist, beneath the earnest and eloquent, 
and yet desperately ignorant, ejaculations of Mr. 
Bryan, beneath the nation-wide political cam- 
paign to set up a religious autocracy by means 
of anti-evolution laws, lies a real issue. That 
issue cannot be escaped. Untilitis grasped, there 
is little hope of any settlement of the Funda- 
mentalist controversy. 

The issue turns upon the failure of the parties 
to this controversy to draw any intelligible dis- 
tinction between the facts of science and the fic- 
tions of the religious imagination. The lamentable 
tyranny which orthodox Protestantism exhibited 
in the recent anti-evolution crusade is directly 


THE ISSUE 53 


traceable to ignorance as to the nature and hm- 
itations of the Christian faith. 

Ever-widening contacts with modern culture 
based upon science are bringing home to the 
minds of men that in religion we are concerned 
primarily with values, not with facts. It is cer- 
tain inner emotional attitudes towards the mys- 
teries of life rather than scientific facts about life 
that make us religious. The symbols of the re- 
ligious imagination by which we represent to our- 
selves these inner emotional attitudes refer not 
to outer reality but to inner reality. When we 
pray, ‘‘Our Father which art in heaven,’’ we 
cannot give the terms ‘‘Father’’ and ‘‘heaven’’ a 
place in objective reality. Try to visualize God 
as an actual Father, or heaven as a definite place 
in time and space, and note the absurdities of 
your thought. These terms are true only as they 
help the religious imagination to symbolize cer- 
tain inner emotional attitudes. 

It is characteristic of the Fundamentalist, 
steeped as he is in the naively realistic language 
of the Bible, that he does not distinguish between 
objective and subjective reality. He mistakes re- 
ligious fictions imagined by the semi-civilized He- 


54 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


brews for facts even more trustworthy than those 
of science. When the writer of the first chapter 
of Genesis said, ‘‘And God said, Let the earth 
bring forth living creatures after their kind, cat- 
tle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth 
after their kind. .: . And God said, Let us make 
man in our image, after our likeness,’’ he did not 
distinguish, in fact was not aware of any distinc- 
tion, between the inner religious need to describe 
God as a creative force and the external reality 
of the mental pictures by which he represented 
that creative energy. The subjective and the ob- 
jective realities are hopelessly confused. This 
naive, uncritical mental attitude has been inher- 
ited by the devout Fundamentalist; he must ac- 
cept it if he believes in a supernaturally revealed 
and inerrant Bible. 

When this naive uncritical religious imagina- 
tion of the Fundamentalist, drawn directly from 
the religious experience of the semi-civilized He- 
brews as recorded in the Old Testament, comes 
in contact with modern culture, imbued with the 
conclusions of science and familiar through psy- 
chology with the nature of religious experience, 
the situation at once becomes strained. ‘The 
Fundamentalist is unable to draw any distinction 


THE ISSUE 55 


between the mental constructs of science, which 
find their test of truth in objective reality, and 
the fictions of the religious imagination which 
are true primarily for the subjective series of 
reality. He cannot accept Darwin’s explanation 
of the origin of the species through natural selec- 
tion without feeling he casts reflections upon the 
first chapter of Genesis in which God is pictured 
as having created every living thing by the im- 
mediate fiat of his divine will. Here then we 
have the very heart of the controversy. 

The Fundamentalist has raised a question of 
vaster import than he imagines. On the surface 
he is protesting against the implications for re- 
ligion of our modern scientific and democratic 
culture; he pleads passionately for loyalty to 
‘‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”’ 
In reality he is arguing the question as to the 
meaning of Christianity and its survival value 
for the modern world. This is frankly asserted 
by one of the ablest protagonists of Fundamen- 
talism who says, ‘‘The liberal attempt at recon- 
ceiling Christianity with modern science has relin- 
quished everything distinctive of Christianity.’ 
The result is that ‘‘modern liberalism is not only 
a different religion from Christianity but belongs 


56 THE CHALLENGE OF FUNDAMENTALISM 


to a totally different class of religions.’’?*° The 
issue between Liberal and Fundamentalist is 
really an issue as to fundamentals. It is, as has 
been suggested above, a question of the nature, 
the function, and the limitations of the religious 
imagination. The next chapter seeks to make 
clearer the meaning of this statement. 


10 J, Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 7%. 


Chapter II 


THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 
Imagination governs mankind.—Napoleon 


K Vere it not for the imagination, the life of 
¥ man would be, in the words of Hobbes, 
‘‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short.’’ It is 
imagination that emancipates man from the tyr- 
ranny of the immediate, unpremeditated, and un- 
controllable sequence of the sensations. It is 
through imagination that he constructs from the 
fragmentary data of the limited five senses a 
coherent and intelligible world. It is by imagina- 
tion that he understands how the worlds were 
made, pictures the processes by which the rocks 
took shape, and follows the rise of life from its 
lowest forms up to man. It is by imagination 
that he spaces the stars in terms of light-years. 
Imagination provides man with an escape from 
the imperfections and defeats of this life, for 
through it he pictures the city of his heart’s de- 
sire and puts it beyond death, where the wicked 


cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. 
BY 





58 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


Imagination provides the artist with the inspira- 
tion for his masterpieces, the scientist with his 
inventive ideas, the philosopher with his cosmic 
insights, and the seer with his divine revelations. 

It is important, therefore, to understand the 
relation of the imagination to the other mental 
powers. 


1. THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION AMONG THE MENTAL 
PROCESSES. 


In spite of the protests of the Fundamentalist 
and the objections of the philosophical idealist, 
the best theory of the origin of mind is still that 
which explains it in terms of function and pre- 
supposes the conclusions of biology. According 
to biology, the powers of the organism are the 
result of natural selection operating under the 
necessity of adaptation to environment. The en- 
tire nervous system is in the main a highly de- 
veloped mechanism for registering, interpreting 
and reacting to stimuli from within or without 
the body. Mind is merely the last stage in this 
age-long process of the organism’s development 
of agencies for adjustment to its environment. 
Kiven within the mind we can detect different 


THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION 59 


levels of evolution. In the reflex and the instinct 
there is an immediate and more or less mechani- 
cal reaction to a stimulus. The mental are does 
not reach the higher brain centers, but is taken 
care of by the lower automatic centers. In the 
case of sensations, mental images, and concepts, 
the higher brain centers act. The mental are at 
this level includes three factors: the sensation, 
the mental elaboration of this through reflection, 
and, finally, the act. 

It is possible to show that the higher mental 
processes grew out of the weaknesses and inade- 
quacies of the lower. The defects of reflex and 
instinct required the development of sensation 
and perception; the imperfections of sensation 
called for memory; the inadequacy of pure mem- 
ory called for imagination; the limitations of 
imagination called for reason. And men are ever 
trying to remedy the defects of reason by falling 
back upon intuition and divination. In the case 
of pure memory it is obvious that we have at 
least a twofold advance upon sensation. For it 
is through memory that we can store up the past 
and anticipate the future. But memory is more 
or less mechanical. Had we only memory, it 
would be necessary, when faced with a new situa- 


60 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


tion, to ransack the storehouse of memory for 
some mental image of a past situation that would 
fit the new one. Failing in this, we should be at 
the mercy of the new situation. It is through 
imagination that we are able to make new mental 
constructs, to synthesize past experiences into 
something that will fit the new situation. Hence 
the exceeding importance of imagination in the 
mental life. Imagination, however, just because 
of its free, creative power, especially needs some 
sort of check which will criticize and verify its 
findings; and this is the role of reason. 

Thus imagination is the most intimate and 
vital, the most human, phase of the mind. At best 
the senses and their recorder, memory, provide 
us with an exceedingly fragmentary and imper- 
fect reproduction of our world. Into the gaps of 
abysmal ignorance left by the transcript of the 
senses, steps the imagination and gives us a pic- 
ture of men and things, imperfect, hopelessly 
colored by the subjective world of human needs, 
and yet intensely fascinating, just because of its 
thorough humanization. 

In the child and in primitive man imagination 
runs riot, carried away by its own exuberance and 
unchecked by reason. Were it not for the chasten- 


THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION 61 


ing effect of the stern processes of nature and 
the iron hand of social conventions, primitive 
man would probably be swept wholly away by his 
imagination and live in a world of dreams. Hiven 
in our own age, the majority of men and women 
react to fictions of their imagination, pictures of 
men and things carried around in their heads, 
which have never been thoroughly criticized and 
bear only the remotest resemblance to reality. 
Napoleon said, ‘‘Imagination governs mankind.’’ 

It is the noblest spirits of the race that are dom- 
inated by imagination. Poets, seers, philoso- 
phers, reformers, the race’s pathfinders, have 
always powerful imaginations. Especially for 
great spiritual leaders, who feel that science and 
common sense cannot solve life’s problems and 
are often swayed by strong emotions, is imagina- 
tion a last resource in their passionate efforts to 
point to better things. But just because they 
have repudiated science and seek to transcend 
common sense, they are particularly liable to 
the illusions that ever dog the imagination. IJm- 
agination is always ready, especially in religion 
and philosophy, to conjure up august ‘‘supersen- 
sible forms shrouded in awe,’’ to which she seeks 
the assent of the human spirit now oblivious to 


62 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


science and common sense. The prophet seeks 
sanction for the fictions of his imagination in 
supernatural revelation; the mystic, fascinated 
by the intuitions born of religious ecstasy, con- 
vinces himself of their objective reality; the phi- 
losopher, swept away by speculative imagination, 
ascribes ontological significance to the creatures 
of his own brain. 

Shelley compares man to ‘‘an Atolian lyre’’ 
upon which the ever-changing winds of existence 
play, producing an ‘‘ever-changing melody.’’ 
The magician who turns the jarring discord of 
brute reality into sweet melody is the imagina- 
tion. That is to say, imagination is not con. 
cerned with a mechanical response to the forces 
of the external world, but transforms these into 
a melodious internal harmony, whether through 
poetry, philosophy, or religion, thus assuring to 
man’s soul a beautiful, intelligible, reverent and 
therefore sympathetic universe. What we miss in 
the immediate brute facts of experience is pro- 
vided by this supreme architect of the soul. It 
erects a world, fictional of course, but a world in 
which the eternal quarrel of good and evil is 
finally settled, in which the craving for beauty is 
satisfied, in which the devil is chained, and the 


THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION 63 


world of values is placed under the eternal cus- 
tody of God. 

Since the imagination is the arch-creator of 
fictions (fictions that are necessary that we may 
have a livable world), does it follow that imagina- 
tion is the arch-deceiver? Is a fiction false sim- 
ply because it is a fiction? The historian’s pic- 
ture of Napoleon is largely fictitious. Is the 
picture false? The scientific constructs underly- 
ing astronomy, chemistry, or biology are fictions, 
that is to say, they are the ways in which the 
trained scientific imagination pictures the situa- 
tion in these phases of reality. Are they, there- 
fore, untrustworthy? What differentiates the sci- 
entific fictions from poetic or religious ones? 
Why do we say that the scientific fictions of Dar- 
win as to the origin of the species are nearer 
reality than the religious fictions of the author of 
the first chapter of Genesis, by which he too vis- 
ualizes the origin of the species? These are vital 
questions, and on the answers to them hang all 
the pressing issues of the relation of faith to 
science and of the place of religion in our mod- 
ern culture. Therefore, we must distinguish be- 
tween the various types of imagination and their 
fictions. 


64 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


2. THE PROBLEM OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION. 


We have seen that imagination interprets and 
humanizes our world. It forms convenient men- 
tal fictions or symbols by which we represent to 
ourselves reality as a whole, the relations between 
parts of reality, or the sense of values generated 
by contact with reality. It follows, therefore, that 
the types of imagination will vary with experi- 
ence. We may have the concrete mental fictions 
of the practical imagination, the schematic, semi- 
mathematical fictions of ‘‘big business’’ or bank- 
ing, the vague symbols of the highly emotional 
or ‘‘diffluent’’ (the term is Ribot’s) type of im- 
agination as in music and the romantic sentimen- 
talism of a Rousseau, the highly symbolic fictions 
of the mystical and religious imagination that re- 
fer primarily to subjective reality, the controlled 
and tested fictions of the scientific imagination 
that refer to objective reality, the concrete vis- 
ual, tactile, or motor imagery of the plastic and 
mechanical types of imagination. It is possible 
to throw these types into two classes: those that 
refer to objective reality and those that refer to 
subjective reality. The practical, scientific and 
mechanical types are primarily external in ref- 


THE PROBLEM OF IMAGINATION 65 


erence, while the ‘‘diffluent’’ and religious types 
are essentially subjective. It will be seen that 
the religious and the scientific types of imagina- 
tion are directly opposed. Halfway between lie 
certain phases of the esthetic imagination. For 
obviously the fictions of the dramatist or the 
novelist must conform to a certain extent to the 
facts of nature and of society while in the case 
of the lyric poet the fictions of the imagination 
must find their test of truth mainly in the inner 
subjective phase of reality. 

The genesis of the religious imagination is 
largely shrouded in mystery. So far, however, 
as we are able to thread our way back into the 
jungle of religious origins, we find three factors 
either actually or potentially present from the 
beginning: an unusual or mysterious object or 
situation arousing a vivid emotional experience, 
probably closely akin to our feeling of awe or 
humility, and an attempt to represent this emo- 
tional experience by means of symbols. This emo- 
tional thrill appears to be ultimate and absolute 
so far as religion is concerned. The emotions 
deal with value. Hence religion is interested pri- 
marily in the value of existence, not in its rational 
explanation. Rites, symbols and later dogmas 


66 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


and philosophical speculations arise, but they are 
dominated by the emotions. The proverb-maker 
was psychologically correct when he said, ‘‘The 
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,’’ and 
hence of religion. Jesus in his discourse on the 
Mount placed poverty of spirit and meekness 
first. Benedict of Nursia in his famous regula 
that became the basis of monasticism put humility 
at the top of the stairway of the virtues. Neither 
humility nor awe is prominent in modern reli- 
gious life. Does this mean that religion itself is 
undergoing a profound modification? 

A sort of naive and uncritical realism charac- 
terizes primitive religion and great creative 
periods in religion so that no clear distinction 
is drawn between the religious experience and the 
symbols of that experience. Loisy says of early 
Christianity: ‘‘ Just as there is no abstract belief, 
so there is no pure symbolic rite, the material 
expression of such a belief. Everything is living, 
the faith, the rite, the baptism and the breaking 
of bread; the baptism is the Holy Ghost and the 
Eucharist is the Christ. There is no speculation 
about the token, no hint of physical efficacy of 
the sacrament in baptism, nor of transubstantia- 
tion in the Eucharist; but what is said and be- 


THE PROBLEM OF IMAGINATION 67 


lieved goes almost beyond these theological as- 
sertions. The worship of the primitive age might 
be defined as a kind of spiritual realism, know- 
ing no pure symbols and essentially sacramental 
by virtue of the place that rites hold in it as the 
vehicle of the spirit and the means of divine 
life.’”?? Religious feeling and the object that 
elicits the feeling, religious value and the symbol 
by which that value is represented, are fused in 
one undifferentiated whole. Reason has not yet 
had time to demand, nor is there any need felt 
for, the rationale of the religious experience. 

The problem of the religious imagination arose 
when men were made aware through increased 
scientific knowledge of the difference between the 
scientific and the religious uses of the imagina- 
tion. It arose when psychology enabled us to see 
that the fictions of the imagination may serve 
either to represent the relations of phenomena in 
the external world as in a law of science or to 
symbolize emotional states without any regard 
to external factual reality as in religion. 

It is the fashion to gloze over this distinction 
and to assert that there is no conflict between 
science and religion. So long, however, as re- 

1The Gospel and the Church, p. 232. 


68 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


ligious fictions are made to carry the double bur- 
den of interpreting both external and internal 
reality, as the Fundamentalist makes them do, 
so long will the conflict exist. To complicate the 
problem the Fundamentalist is soaked in the 
naive and uncritical religious realism of the Bible 
written long before psychology had given men 
any insight into the factors involved. In the 
Bible fact and fiction are confused. Its writers 
were ever unconsciously making use of fictions 
to describe matters of fact as well as of faith. 
To the writers of the gospels, for example, the 
miracles of Jesus were not felt to be fictions by 
which all men of that age described the activity 
of the chosen agents of God. There is an uncriti- 
cal fusion of miracle with the immediate and in- 
disputable reality of the religious experiences 
ealled out by the person and work of Jesus. The 
liberal scholar, by recognizing that miracle is sig- 
nificant only as it throws light upon the workings 
of the religious imaginations of the sacred 
writers, is relieved of the necessity of establish- 
ing or defending its historical truth. The ortho- 
dox scholar, on the other hand, must defend 
miracle both in the religious and the scientific 
imaginations. He is forced to claim not only 


THE SYMBOLS OF IMAGINATION 69 


that miracle is real for the inner realm of reli- 
gious experience, but that miracle holds true 
likewise for objective reality in history and in 
nature. Here, as already suggested, we have the 
very heart of the issue between Fundamentalism 
and modern culture. It is a problem of the na- 
ture, the functions and the limitations of the 
religious imagination. 


3. THE SYMBOLS OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION. 


Every form of thought is symbolic. The 
physicist takes motion as the simplest and clear- 
est of the phenomena of nature and uses it to 
explain the behavior of matter. Similarly the 
atom and the cell are symbols for the chemist 
and biologist. The symbolic nature of thought 
is even more in evidence in psychology. For 
when the psychologist talks of a ‘‘clear’’ idea, 
a ‘‘highly colored’’ imagination, or an ‘‘iron’’ 
will, he is selecting from other spheres than that 
of the mind, objects or qualities which, by anal- 
ogy, he uses to symbolize psychical processes. In 
philosophy symbolical thinking is indispensable. 
For since neither the totality nor the essence of 
reality is ever given in experience, we are forced 


70 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


to fall back upon phases of existence which we 
use to symbolize existence as a whole. Thus the 
idealist takes the facts of mind and uses them 
as symbols to explain existence as a whole. The 
materialist uses the facts of matter in the same 
way. ' 

Religious thinking is, however, most symbolic 
of all—for several reasons. In religion we are 
concerned with the feelings most intimate and 
vital to the person concerned. They are thus the 
most difficult to represent objectively. The clas- 
sical example of this is the mystic’s constant 
avowal of the incommunicable nature of his ex- 
periences. After one of his frequent visions, Paul 
said that he ‘‘heard unspeakable words.’’ The 
religious sentiments are associated, furthermore, 
with the great mysteries of life that baffle scientist 
and philosopher, so that, in addition to the in- 
tangible nature of emotions, there is the inherent 
difficulty of the ideas these emotions evoke. The 
religious thinker has, therefore, to fall back upon 
the higher figurative language familiar in poetry 
while at the same time often claiming to use this 
language with an exactness found only in the 
sciences. Here we have a psychological difficulty 
which the Fundamentalist, with his claim of an 


THE SYMBOLS OF IMAGINATION 71 


infallible revelation of divine truth, persistently 
ignores. It has been well said: ‘‘The idea that 
religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, repre- 
sentation of truth and life is simply an impossible 
idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within 
the region of profitable philosophizing on that 
subject.’’ 

A religious symbol is a sign or emblem, drawn 
from the external world of observation, by which 
we seek to represent to ourselves some inner ex- 
perience too subtle to be grasped otherwise. The 
symbols of the religious imagination differ from 
the symbols of other types of imagination mainly 
in their highly symbolic character. A map is a 
symbol as is also a crucifix. It is obvious, how- 
ever, that they differ widely in the uses they 
permit. One can take a map and find where a 
river runs or a mountain chain stands. A cruci- 
fix obviously throws no light upon the topography 
of heaven or hell. It gives us no knowledge of 
the religious world that can be called scientifically 
exact. It merely symbolizes phases of the Chris- 
tian experience. It serves as an emblem of Chris- 
tian piety. The earliest symbols of the Christian 
imagination are found on the walls of the cata- 
combs of Rome. Future blessedness was sym- 


72 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


bolized by the rose, paradise by flowery meads. 
A curtain slightly drawn symbolized entrance into 
immortality. A shepherd carrying a lamb on his 
shoulders, a figure adapted from the shepherd 
god Hermes, symbolized Christ. At this level 
of naive religious realism, the feelings and the 
objects associated with them were so closely 
blended that there was little consciousness of the 
symbolic character of these objects. 

A symbol may be drawn from the realm of 
ideas as well as that of things, and perhaps the 
most characteristic symbols used by the religious 
imagination at this higher level are myth, legend, 
and dogma. A myth is a story embodying a be- 
lief and is the earliest portrayal of the values 
of morals, art, religion, and philosophy. In myth 
the imagination tends to personify events or 
ideas, while in the legend the imaginative ma- 
terial deals with a person or persons. The legend, 
therefore, is apt to be closer to historical fact 
than the myth. Legend, or ‘‘that which is ap- 
pointed to be read’’ (legendus), was the term 
used of the lives of the saints in the Middle Ages, 
compiled as Acta Sanctorum by the Bollandist 
Fathers in sixty folio volumes. There is scarcely 
a great figure of history that does not have its 


THE SYMBOLS OF IMAGINATION 73 


legendary penumbra. lLycurgus in Plutarch’s 
Lives is a typical example. A dramatic and fas- 
cinating personality dominates the imaginations 
of men and becomes a starting point for expan- 
sions of feeling or flights of the religious or moral 
fancy. The personalities concerned may become 
in time almost historical symbols. One needs only 
to think of the figures of Cyrus, Pythagoras, 
Plato, Alexander, Cesar, Jesus of Nazareth. 
Since the myth grows by association of ideas it 
is apt to be more luxuriant, accidental and fan- 
tastic. The legend, taking its departure from a 
person, is apt to be more coherent. The legend is 
better adapted than the myth to the imaginative | 
portrayal of religious experience. Myth predom- 
inates at the more primitive level of the Old 
Testament, while legend is more in evidence in 
the New, especially in the gospel narratives about 
Jesus. Legend has played a very large part in 
Christianity. If one eliminated from the gospel 
narratives and from the epistles of Paul the 
legendary elements and deprived the Middle Ages 
of the legends of the saints, the history of Chris- 
tianity would be incomprehensible. Just as the 
vitality of Greek art is due to its symbols being 
so satisfying to the esthetic imagination, so is 


74 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


the vitality of Christianity due to the perennial 
appeal of its symbols. 

Dogma differs from myth and legend in this: 
before we can have dogma the raw material of 
mental images that prevail for myth and legend 
must be criticized and reduced to logical con- 
cepts. Dogmas are not purely theoretical; they 
arise mostly under pressure of the practical. The 
great dogmas of the Church result from a sort 
of dialectic between the slow-moving, irrational, 
powerful forces of group life and its leaders’ 
desire for logical consistency. On the one hand 
is religious life as expressed in cultus with all its 
contradictions and crudities; on the other is the 
theologian with his logical refinements. It is 
ecclesiastical authority, voicing the imperative 
demand for continuity and integrity of group 
life, that compels these two forces to adopt some 
compromise. All dogmas are compromises be- 
tween logic on the one hand and life on the other. 
At the beginning of his book, ‘‘The Common 
Law,’’ Chief Justice Holmes remarks, ‘‘The law 
is not logic, but life.’? This dictum holds for 
dogma. When the dogmatic fictions cease to in- 
terpret religious experience, they wither and de- 


THE SYMBOLS OF IMAGINATION 75 


cay. They can not be saved by ‘‘monkey-bills.’’ 

An ideal system of dogma would be derived 
immediately from religious experience, in a 
purely scientific spirit, undisturbed by passion 
or prejudice or party interest. But dogmas arise 
where the mental detachment and scientific spirit 
necessary for this ideal are impossible. Hence 
religious dogmas never have the clarity, self- 
consistency, and compelling power of the conclu- 
sions of science. They bear the imprint of many 
forces, partly accidental, partly logical, partly 
emotional, partly due to associations of the age 
or culture and partly due to group interest on 
ecclesiastical politics. The purest dogmas arose 
earliest and in close touch with the great crea- 
tive religious enthusiasm of the early Church. 
The Pauline doctrines of sin and the cross are of 
this type, and so is the dogma of the deity of 
Jesus that arose spontaneously within the group 
of Gentile Christians who worshiped Jesus as 
their cult hero. Here the connection between 
dogma and the play of the legendary imagination 
over the person and work of Jesus is evident. 
Later we have a second group of dogmas that 
arose to reconcile the differences between the 


76 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


dogmas of the. first type. For example, the 
dogma of the deity of Jesus was bound to con- 
flict with the traditional monotheism of the Jew 
on the one hand and the reality of Jesus’ hu- 
manity on the other. The great Christological 
and Trinitarian controversies of the third and 
fourth centuries, with the several creedal state- 
ments of which the Nicene Creed is the most fa- 
mous, were the result. 

Finally we have dogmas that arose to assure 
the truth and authority of the dogmas of the 
first two types. The great dogmas of the infal- 
libility of the Pope in the Catholic Church and 
of the inerrancy of the Bible among Protestants 
have their raison d’étre as safeguards of the cit- 
adel of dogma. Since these dogmas of the third 
type occupy the strategic position, they are ever 
to the front when dogma is challenged. When 
they are overthrown it becomes difficult, not to 
say impossible, to defend the dogmas of the first 
two types. When the dogma of the infallible 
inspiration of the Bible goes, obviously a breach 
is made for an attack upon a whole group of 
dogmas such as miracle, the virgin birth, the 
resurrection, and the deity of Jesus. 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 77 


4, THE DECAY OF DOGMA. 


The slow decay before our eyes of the grandiose 
structure of Christian dogma is not the least in- 
teresting phase of modern religious imagination. 
Before the rise of modern culture, which is 
hardly more than two centuries old, dogma 
reigned supreme in ‘the religious imagination. 
This tyranny of religious dogma over the mind 
of the western world for nearly seventeen cen- 
turies is amazing. It is well to remember, how- 
ever, what made it possible. As early as Irenzus 
(d. 202 a.p.) we find this statement: ‘‘It is bet- 
ter and wiser to remain a fool and unlearned and 
through love to be nearer to God rather than to 
be learned and clever and be found blasphemers 
of the Lord.’’ Why this tinge of intellectual de- 
featism which orthodox Christianity from Ire- 
neus to William Jennings Bryan has never lost? 
In the answer to that question is found the an- 
swer to the other question as to the long reign 
of dogma. 

When Irenzeus wrote, men were living in a de- 
cadent age and had lost confidence in life. They 
sought escape from a world-wide pessimism. 
Terrified by the specter of a dying civilization, 


78 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


men made Jesus the panacea of their desperate 
spiritual ills. The religious imagination clothed 
him with incorruptibility and fashioned out of 
his life and death symbols of life eternal. Then, 
closing the door in the face of discredited and 
distrusted reason, they surrendered their own 
critical powers to these dear fictions and gave up 
to religious dogma, backed by a militant church, 
the keys to heaven and hell. An uncritical and 
subservient acceptance of dogma has thus always 
gone hand in hand with a pessimistic attitude 
towards culture with its emphasis upon the self- 
sufficiency of reason. Intellectual defeatism lies 
deep in the traditions of Christianity. This is 
why it is so exceedingly difficult for orthodox 
Christianity to adjust itself to modern culture. 
For this adjustment calls for nothing short of a 
transvaluation of values so far as _ historical 
Christianity is concerned. 

To understand how this yoke of dogma was 
broken we must remind ourselves of shifts in the 
attitude of the mind towards its own mental con- 
structs. These mental shifts are suggested by 
the terms fiction, hypothesis, and dogma. All 
mental constructs are ‘‘fictions’’ (fingere, to in- 
vent, feign). In this broad sense we have used 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 79 


the term up to this point. It is now necessary 
to take ‘‘fiction’’ in a somewhat more restricted 
sense. A pure fiction is one that is consciously 
a fiction, or a ‘‘make-believe.’’ The ‘‘make-be- 
lieves’’ of children and the delight they take in 
them indicate how deeply ingrained is the im- 
pulse to create fictions. But these ‘‘make-be- 
leves’’ are not limited to childhood. Every play, 
picture, poem, or statue is a ‘‘make-believe.’’ 
Its artistic effect depends upon our cooperating 
with the artist and entering into his work and 
treating it as though it were real. ‘‘Make-be- 
lieves’’ abound in science, even in mathematics. 
The fiction that parallel lines meet at infinity is 
a ‘‘make-believe’’ the mathematician asks us to 
accept as an aid to the elaboration of his science. 
Higher mathematics is based upon ‘‘make-be- 
lieves”’ or fictions of the mathematical imagina- 
tion that we are asked to accept as though they 
were true. Every science has its ‘‘make-be- 
lieves.’’ Their justification in science is found 
in the way in which they aid our thinking. They 
throw no light upon reality itself. 

The hypothesis as distinguished from the fic- 
tion looks towards reality, for it is a mental con- 
struct we set up with the hope that it may in 


80 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


time prove to be true. A fiction is a sort of scaf- 
folding erected to facilitate thought or emotion 
and does not look to reality while a hypothe- 
sis points beyond the immediate exigencies of 
thought or feeling to something external. Hy- 
pothesis seeks to fill up the gaps in our experl- 
ence of men and things through some compre- 
hensive and reliable picture of reality. Fictions 
are tools the mind creates to help it do its work 
or live its life. In the case of a hypothesis, we 
seek for verification; in the case of the fiction, 
we are satisfied if it justifies itself as an aid 
to thought or feeling. Obviously the distinction 
drawn is of far-reaching importance for the rela- 
tion of science to religion. The scientific imagi- 
nation deals with hypotheses primarily, although 
it may also invent fictions. In the religious im- 
agination we have fictions, usually unconscious 
‘‘make-believes,’’ used as symbols of experience. 
Hypotheses are of little or no use in religion 
apart from comparative religion or the psychol- 
ogy of religion, which are scientific. The re- 
ligious urge is not towards an understanding of 
reality, but towards the satisfaction of inner 
needs. Here is the real test of the value of our 
religious fictions. 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 81 


A dogma, as distinguished from fiction and 
hypothesis, is a doctrine one accepts as true on 
the authority of some one else without subject- 
ing it to critical analysis. Now it is interesting 
and important that the mind is far more at ease 
with dogmas than with either fictions or hypoth- 
eses. The hypothesis implies more or less insta- 
bility, a condition of suspended judgment. This 
causes tension and unrest highly irksome to the 
average mind. What we all want is a ‘‘Thus 
saith the Lord’’ or a dogma. ‘‘Every man,’’ 
says Emerson, ‘‘must choose between truth and 
rest’’; and the vast majority elect for the rest- 
ful stability of dogma. The result is that the 
human mind has an almost irresistible tendency 
to turn all its hypotheses into dogmas. 

There are two ways of turning hypotheses into 
dogmas, one of them legitimate and the other 
illegitimate. The legitimate way is found in 
science, where repeated testing and confirmation 
gradually harden a hypothesis into an approved 
dogma of science. The illegitimate and usual 
way is amply illustrated in religion, where habits 
of thought and life arise which in time demand 
the truth and reality of the belief they imply. 
Religious habits of thought and life built up 


82 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


through use have always antedated the promul- 
gation of great dogmas in the church. Use 
made it psychologically possible to claim for 
these supernatural authority. This is illustrated 
by the great dogmas of the immaculate concep- 
tion and papal infallibility. In science a hy- 
pothesis is consciously held in abeyance until it 
ean be subjected to critical testing. In religion 
the raw material for dogma is accumulated hap- 
hazard fashion through generations of religious 
use and then finds logical formulation in a bull 
of the pope or the pronouncements of church 
councils. Owing to their peculiar origin, re- 
ligious dogmas are never safe from attack. The 
conviction that an idea is right because our habits 
of thought demand that it should be right is a 
conceit of knaves as well as of saints. The deep- 
est-dyed villainy is found in one ‘‘who having 
unto truth, by telling of it, made such a sinner 
of his memory, to credit his own lie.’’ 

Many doctrines, accepted as the unchallenged 
dogmas in later times, were in the beginning fic- 
tions or hypotheses. The myths used by Plato 
in his philosophical speculations were originally 
fictions. With Plato they hardened into hypoth- 
eses by which he sought to explain reality. 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 83 


Among the Neoplatonists, towards the end of an- 
tiquity, they were accepted as dogmas. The fa- 
mous economic doctrine of Adam Smith that all 
men are actuated by selfish interest was a fiction. 
It is obviously contradicted by the facts of ex- 
perience. Adam Smith invented it as a conven- 
ient means of ordering his thought on economic 
matters. It was speedily transformed into a 
hypothesis and then hardened into a fixed dogma 
of Ricardo and the classical economists and their 
modern followers. 

Had we first-hand knowledge of the rise of the 
myths of the Old Testament, such as the story 
of the Fall or of the Flood, it is highly probable 
we should find that at first these were conscious 
myths. That is to say, they were fictions which 
were transformed, thanks to man’s desire for a 
‘‘Thus saith the Lord,’’ into the dogmas of the 
Fundamentalists. Had we accurate and exhaus- 
tive knowledge of the life and thought of the early 
Christians, we undoubtedly should find a period, 
immediately after the death of Jesus, when they 
felt that the idea of the resurrection was a hy- 
pothesis of their religious imagination growing 
out of their passionate need for a continuation 
of the life and influence of their great teacher. 


84 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


This speedily hardened into a dogma. Similarly, 
a first-hand acquaintance with the evolution of 
the thought of Paul would probably show a period 
when he felt that his doctrines of the cross and 
of the eternal preexistent Christ were fictions 
made necessary by the problem of rendering the 
gospel acceptable to a gentile world. In read- 
ing the fourth gospel, where legendary elements 
are more in evidence than in the other gospels, 
one gets the impression, especially from incidents 
such as the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, 
that a discussion of these incidents with the actual 
author of this gospel, would have revealed that 
he was consciously using tetions to make vivid 
and appealing the religious importance of Jesus. 
Today, thanks to the hard, mechanical dogma of 
biblical inspiration, the original beauty of these 
gospel narratives is lost. 

In spite of the tendency to turn all fictions and 
hypotheses into dogmas, it often happens, owing 
to the pressure of events, that dogmas undergo 
a process of decay, degenerating into hypotheses 
and fictions, or are discarded entirely. The 
dogma of the virgin birth is for the liberal theo- 
logian a hypothesis; for the radical critic, it is 
a fiction. This reversal of the natural tendency 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 85 


of the mind is exceedingly instructive for an un- 
derstanding of the decay of dogma. The degra- 
dation of dogma into hypothesis or fiction is usu- 
ally brought about in one of two ways: the direct 
discrediting of the dogma through increased 
knowledge, or the atrophy of the dogma through 
disuse in altered ways of life. The latter is more 
deadly, although less spectacular than the first, 
which occurs in hot controversy often accompa- 
nied by bloodthirsty scalping of theological ad- 
versaries. The quiet growth in moral refinement 
and enlightened ways of life has discredited 
such dogmas as original sin or the blood atone- 
ment. Better command of the forces of nature 
and deeper insight into her laws have discred- 
ited supernaturalism. Miracle in our modern 
scientific life is less than a curiosity; it has be- 
come a piece of superfluous theological baggage. 

It is where findings of science clash directly 
with accepted dogmas, as in the case of Galileo 
and Darwin, that the degradation of dogma takes 
place in the more spectacular fashion. The top- 
pling of the walls of dogma at the blast of the 
scientist’s ram’s horn is not devoid of its tragi- 
comic elements. Galileo was forced publicly on 
his knees to make the following recantation: ‘‘I, 


86 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a pris- 
oner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, 
having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which 
I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest 
the error and the heresy of the movement of the 
earth.’’ 

The church, rallying to the support of the 
dogma of an earth-centered astronomy, proceeded 
to crush the heresy, one theologian making use 
of this cogent argument: ‘‘ Animals which move 
have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs 
or muscles, therefore it does not move.’’ Finally 
a pope, using his infallibility, condemned the new 
astronomy, putting on the Index of the church 
‘fall writings which affirm the motion of the 
earth.’’ This would seem to have settled the 
matter, Galileo, together with the sun and the 
earth, apparently having no alternative to obey- 
ing the infallible decree of the pope. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century, how- 
ever, we find this remarkable statement from a 
Jesuit mathematician: ‘‘As for me, full of re- 
spect for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of 
the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as im- 
movable; nevertheless, for simplicity in expla- 
nation, I will argue as if the earth moves; for 


THE DECAY OF DOGMA 87 


it is proved that of the two hypotheses [italics 
the writer’s] the appearances favor this idea.’’ 
Dogma has so far degenerated as to become a 
hypothesis. The final stage, which has long been 
reached, is where the dogma of the fixity of the 
earth is considered as merely a religious fiction 
of the Middle Ages that has today only an his- 
torical interest. | 

The Fundamentalist opponents of evolution are 
careful to characterize it as an ‘‘unproven hy- 
pothesis.’’ This is practically equivalent to ad- 
mitting that the doctrine of special creation in 
Genesis is also a hypothesis, for if Genesis is 
absolutely and infallibly right, as the dogma of 
inspiration asserts, then evolution can not even 
be called a hypothesis. The final admission of 
the fictional character of the account in Genesis 
of the origin of life is only a matter of time, 
thanks to the irresistible impact of the facts. 
Even for the Fundamentalists, who now admit 
it as a hypothesis, it will degenerate into a use- 
less fiction on a par with the medieval fiction of 
the fixity of the earth. If the Fundamentalist 
wishes to preserve these fictions of Genesis it 
must be upon some other basis than their scien- 
tific value. 


88 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


As dogma falls into decay, especially where 
the dogma is undermined by criticism and the 
disruptive effect of new facts, it is faced by two 
alternatives. The dogma concerned may be so 
eontrary to the facts, and its critical destruction 
may be so complete, that it is discarded entirely. 
The dogma of the fixity of the earth is an in- 
stance. Decaying dogmas rarely find a congenial 
resting-place as hypotheses, for a hypothesis is 
something that may be proved. Hence the alter- 
native is to retain dogmas as symbolic religious 
fictions. In fact when once a dogma has been 
discarded as a doctrine whose truth is guaran- 
teed by supernatural revelation, it can survive 
only as a religious symbol. 

We are now able to realize the excessive diffi- 
culties of the problem of religion versus modern 
culture. The great classical forms of religion 
flourished in ages of faith when men did not 
know that their thought was made up of fictions. 
It could hardly have been otherwise. But now 
we are becoming increasingly aware of the ex- 
treme tenuousness of religious imagination. The 
conviction of its fictional and symbolic nature is 
growing. The Fundamentalist attributes the de- 
cay of dogma to the spread of the modern spirit, 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 89 


which he characterizes as ‘‘rationalistic,’’ ‘‘mate- 
rialistic,’’ or ‘‘skeptical.’’ These epithets should 
not blind us to the operation of forces in modern 
life that are altering religion radically. The deg- 
radation of dogma is under way and is likely to 
continue despite the strenuous opposition of the 
orthodox. 


0. THE DILEMMA OF THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION. 


If constructs of the religious imagination be 
classed in the future as essentially fictional we 
shall face some interesting questions. Every 
hypothesis, as we have seen, implies suspended 
judgment. There is always the possibility that 
the hypothesis may find verification in the facts. 
Since it is not possible to subject the religious 
constructs to the factual tests of science, it would 
seem that in religion we are restricted to a choice 
between dogma and fiction. Dogma belongs to an 
earlier and less critical stage of culture when it 
was made to serve a double role. For a dogma 
was not only a symbol, but likewise a guarantee 
of the reality of the religious objects it symbol- 
ized. Dogma developed out of a stage of ex- 
perience when men did not discriminate between 


90 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


the symbolic role of the dogma and the religious 
realities for which it was thought the dogma 
stood. 

As increased knowledge convinces men that the 
religious imagination can use only fictions or 
symbols, the inevitable effect is to weaken reli- 
gious convictions. To ask the devout soul to use 
the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as symbolic 
fictions without any meaning for reality, but 
solely as a means of satisfying religious needs, 
is to demand a degree of sophistication far be- 
yond the mental powers of the average man. It 
may be an illusion, but the Christian who prays 
‘‘Give us this day our daily bread’’ must believe 
that a divine ear actually hears these words and 
that a divine will is actually influenced thereby. 
The religious imagination, therefore, faces a seri- 
ous dilemma. It has to choose between an ac- 
ceptance of dogma with its outworn accompani- 
ments of supernaturalism and authoritarianism 
as necessary guarantees of the conviction so vital 
to faith, and a yielding to the trend of modern 
thought that relegates dogma to the fictions of 
the imagination but at the risk of a disillusion- 
ment that will undermine religious conviction. 

It is a favorite argument of the conservative 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 91 


that, when you have convinced men that their 
religious beliefs are only fictions of the religious 
imagination, religion itself will disappear. This 
is equivalent to saying that religion can not be 
based upon conscious illusions. This may be 
granted for the sake of argument. It does not 
follow, however, that religion in the past has not 
been based upon illusions, that religious belief 
today does not include illusions or that the re- 
ligious beliefs of the future will be free from 
illusions. The story of religion is a story of dis- 
illusion. History’s pages are strewn with tomb- 
stones of dead gods. The gods of Olympus, who 
were factual realities for Homer and AUschylus, 
began to be questioned by Euripides, and towards 
the close of antiquity were the subject of brilliant 
satires by Lucian. The Jehovah of the days of 
Judges was for men like the second Isaiah largely 
a fiction of an earlier, cruder religious imagina- 
tion. Volumes have been written recording the 
gradual discarding of ideas, once firmly accepted 
as essentials of Christian faith, but now rele- 
gated to the limbo of fictions of a superstitious 
religious imagination. Men at any one period 
may be convinced that their religious beliefs cor- 
respond to eternal religious verities, but there is 


92 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


only one inference to be drawn from the history 
of religion, namely, that the religious imagination 
has dealt and will ever deal with fictions. 

In the Bible and for hundreds of years after- 
wards, men did not hesitate to look upon the sym- 
bols of the religious imagination as equally valid 
for objective and subjective reality. Allegory is 
the typical illustration of this habit of thought. 
In the fourteenth chapter of Genesis three short 
verses are devoted to the mention of a certain 
priest Melchizedek, who blessed Abraham on his 
return from the slaughter of the kings. Nothing 
more is said either of the previous or of the sub- 
sequent history of Melchizedek. The writer of 
Hebrews takes this accidental brevity of the Gen- 
esis record as symbolical of another high priest, 
Jesus Christ, who like Melchizedek is ‘‘ without 
father, without mother, without genealogy, hav- 
ing neither beginning of days nor end of years’’ 
(Heb. 7:3). That is to say, the Genesis record 
was held to be true objectively and historically 
with reference to Melchizedek and also symbol- 
ically and spiritually of the risen and glorified 
Christ. This allegorical doubling of reality 
reached absurd lengths in the monks’ writings 
of the early Middle Ages. 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 93 


The attempt to carry over this double role of 
the symbols of the religious imagination into mod- 
ern times has proven more and more embarrass- 
ing to the Christian apologist. When Luke says 
of the ascension of Jesus, ‘‘And it came to pass, 
while he blessed them, he parted from them, and 
was carried up into heaven’’ (Luke 24:51), it 
was easy for men of that day to take the record 
as it was intended to be taken, namely, that Jesus 
had gone to a definite place above the earth, called 
heaven. For the astronomy of the Bible pictures 
the earth as flat with four corners, heaven and 
hell being located above and below this flat sur- 
face. But according to modern astronomy heaven 
and hell would then change places every twenty- 
four hours. In order to save Luke’s historical 
veracity it becomes necessary to say that he 
used this language symbolically. Jesus’ physical 
ascension was only a symbol of his return to 
heaven, not the actual reality. Scientific criticism 
is making it increasingly difficult to hold that the 
virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus were origi- 
nally true both for the objective world of fact 
and for the subjective world of value. More and 
more their objective historical value is disap- 
pearing and they are viewed solely as fictions of 


94 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


the religious imagination aroused by the vivid 
impression of Jesus’ personality and teachings 
upon his followers. Their value for us today is 
symbolic, not historical. 

Granted that the constructs of the religious 
imagination must remain symbolic fictions, it re- 
mains to determine more definitely what sort of 
fictions they are. Obviously the term ‘‘fiction”’ 
may be used in a number of senses. The fictions 
of the poet, dramatist, or romancer are conscious 
fictions but, with the possible exception of the 
creations of the lyric poet, they can hardly be 
called pure fictions. The painter or novelist must 
regard the external series of reality in that he 
draws his raw materials from sense data gained 
from this world. To be sure, the element of fic- 
tion comes in when he synthesizes these sense 
data into imaginative wholes such as a Lorraine 
landscape or a character of Dickens, but even this 
fiction is checked up by reality in a larger sense. 
We demand of the painter or the novelist that 
his imaginative creation should not transcend 
possibility. We must feel that the character 
might have existed. There is a very real sense 
in which ‘‘the painter by his pictures shows us 
reality more truly’’ (I am indebted to my col- 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 95 


league, Prof. Adelbert Ames, Jr., for this observa- 
tion). Reality is so exhaustless, our fumbling 
senses give us such fragmentary elements of the 
pluralistic welter, that without the great stereo- 
types struck out by the artist’s imagination much 
of reality would escape us entirely. The artist’s 
stereotypes may even tyrannize over the popular 
imagination, forcing it for generations to see only 
certain phases of reality. The conventional faces 
and forms of the sculptures of the Gothic cathe- 
dral, the ‘‘canonical’’ figure of the athlete struck 
out from the marble by Polyclitus, and the figures 
of Donatello are cases in point. These great mas- 
ters compelled the imaginations of their contem- 
poraries to see only certain shapes, to love only 
certain ideals of beauty. Care must be taken, 
however, not to stress too much this affiliation 
of the fictions of the artistic imagination with 
those of the scientific imagination. How far, 
for example, did Turner in his marvelous skies 
and Corot in his idyllic landscapes seek ‘‘to show 
us reality more truly,’’ and how far did they 
make use of pictorial symbols to further a richer 
expansion of the inner life? Certainly the men- 
tal imagery and the accompanying emotional sat- 
isfactions inspired by great music shade over 


96 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


into the field of the religious imagination, for 
they give us practically no insight into reality. 
Their function is almost purely symbolical. 

The fictions of the religious imagination are to 
be distinguished again from illusion and halluci- 
nation. A hallucination is seeing things that are 
not there or experiencing sensations and inner 
states that have no external cause. It is usually 
the accompaniment of a disordered state of the 
nervous system. When Luther, according to the 
story, lifted his eyes from his book, saw the 
devil standing in a corner of his room in the 
Wartburg castle and threw the inkwell at him, 
he suffered from a religious hallucination. When 
the Freudian suggests that the Christian who 
prays to his God is merely imploring an imagi- 
native symbol created by the suppressed wishes 
of his subconscious self, he has taken a long 
step towards reducing religion to a hallucination. 

An illusion differs from a hallucination in that 
its stimulus comes from the outside world but 
is misinterpreted by the mind, as when we mis- 
take the sound of cannon for thunder. Illusion 
is a term which we apply to the realms of science 
and common sense. That is to say, it describes 
a situation made familiar to us in external real- 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 97 


ity. Now, when we apply to the fictions of the 
religious imagination the same tests applied to 
scientific constructs we find the religious imagi- 
nation has always abounded in illusions and 
doubtless will continue to abound in them. The 
gods of ancient Egypt or the witches executed 
at Salem were fictions of the religious imagina- 
tion which from the point of view of history and | 
psychology were illusions. The assumption un- 
derlying the anti-evolution law of Tennessee that 
the account in Genesis of creation corresponds to 
the facts is an illusion of the religious imagina- 
tion. We may go further and say that there is 
not a great religious dogma which, subjected to 
strict scientific tests, does not become akin to 
an illusion. Immortality, God, freedom, eternal 
damnation, original sin, predestination, the Trin- 
ity, the dual nature of Jesus Christ, all these and 
many more, when thus tested, become illusions. 
The great dogma of the Trinity is logically 
absurd and psychologically illusory. The theo- 
logians at the Council of Nicea (325 a.p.) seemed 
vaguely aware of these difficulties. Arius’s uni- 
tarianism, which was condemned and branded as 
heresy, is much easier to reconcile with the de- 
mands of logic and science than the trinitarian- 


98 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


ism of Athanasius. The trinitarianism defended 
against the Monarchians by Tertullian (150-230 
A.D.) and adopted by Athanasius (296-373 a.p.) 
is an abyss of contradictions. Tertullian, who 
did much to formulate this doctrine, says in his 
controversy with the heretical Monarchians: ‘‘1 
should not hesitate to call the tree the son or 
offspring of the root.... The Father and the 
Son are two, therefore, as root and tree are two. 
Hence the twoness of the godhead is not incom- 
patible with its unity.”?* The Monarchians ob- 
jected: ‘‘Now Father and Son are of the same 
substance and absolutely one so when the Father 
produced the Son we have the paradoxical situa- 
tion that the son or begotten one being of the 
same substance with the father actually plays the 
role of being his own father. . . . In order to be 
a father I have a son, for I can never be a son 
to myself; and in order to be a son, I have a 
father, it being impossible for me to be my own 
father. It is these relations that make me what 
Iam. ... Now if I am to be myself any one or 
all of these relations (the Trinity includes Father 
and Son) I no longer have what I am myself to 
be: neither a father because I am to be my own 
2 Ad Prazean, ch. 8. 


THE DILEMMA OF IMAGINATION 99 


father; nor a son for I shall be my own son. 
Moreover, inasmuch as I ought to have (actually 
be in one of) these relations in order to be, if I 
am to be both together I shall fail to be one while 
I possess not the other. For if I must be myself 
my son, who am also a father, I now cease to 
have a son since [am my own son. But by reason 
of not having a son, since I am my own son, how 
ean I be a father? For I ought to have a son in 
order to be a father. Therefore I am not a son, 
because I have not a father who makes a son. 
In like manner if I am myself my father, who 
am also a son, I no longer have a father but am 
myself my father. But by not having a father, 
since I am my own father, how can I be a son?’’ 
Upon which Tertulhan with pious indignation 
observes, ‘‘Now all this must be the device of 
the devil.’’? 

It is amazing that those using the fictions of 
the religious imagination seem unconcerned when 
reminded by critics that these fictions abound in 
logical contradictions. In spite of Arius and the 
Monarchians the dogma of the Trinity was ac- 
cepted at the Council of Nicwa, 325 a.p., and still 
remains a central dogma of Fundamentalism. It 

3 Ibid., Ch. 10, 


100 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


is this phase of the religious imagination that 
seems to many scientists the very essence of 
obscurantism and little short of intellectual in- 
decency. For science and common sense demand 
that the fictions of the imagination shall be free 
from logical contradictions and shall find sub- 
stantial support in external reality. Harnack 
says: ‘‘The man [Athanasius] who saved the 
character of Christianity as a religion of living 
fellowship with God, was the man from whose 
Christology almost every trait which recalls the 
historical Jesus of Nazareth was erased.’’ Fur- 
thermore, the symbols were so absurd and illogi- 
cal that ‘‘there was in fact no philosophy in ex- 
istence possessed of formule which could present 
in an intelligible shape the propositions of Atha- 
nasius.’’ 4 

How then are we to explain why the church 
speaking through Athanasius insisted upon hav- 
ing these dogmas? Paraphrasing Chief Justice 
Holmes’s dictum as to the law, one may reply, 
‘“‘Dogma (that is, real vital dogma) is not logic 
but life.’’ The adoration of Jesus as the eternal 
preéxistent son of God had grown up within the 
use and wont of the church. The imaginative 


4 History of Dogma, IV, 45, 47. 


SYMBOL AND REALITY 101 


symbols of Jesus as eternal divine son had be- 
come part and parcel of the cultus of the church. 
This pragmatic test decided the matter for Atha- 
nasius. He reasoned thus: ‘‘God alone is to be 
adored. It is of course heathenish to worship 
creatures. Jesus Christ has been worshiped by 
the church from the beginning as God. Christ 
therefore shares in the divine substance.’’ There 
is but one inference to be drawn from the history 
of the rise of dogma and its hold upon the re- 
ligious life of men. Dogma is a symbolic fiction 
of the religious imagination. It is not formulated 
primarily to serve the ends of logic, science, or 
even philosophy. It is not created as a means of 
interpreting reality or increasing our knowledge, 
though there may be misguided attempts to make 
it serve these purposes. Dogma is primarily a 
symbol and its vitality is measured directly in 
terms of the extent to which it makes meaningful 
the ‘‘mysteries’’ of religious experience. 


6. SYMBOL AND REALITY. 


The naive religious consciousness assumes the 
external factual existence of religious beings such 
as God, angels, devils, or disembodied spirits, 


102 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


certain definite religious localities, such as heaven 
and hell, certain historical events in the unfolding 
of the providential plan of God for the redemp- 
tion of the world. The uncritical religious mind 
assumes that religion is a matter of direct experi- 
ence of these external factual realities. Religious 
knowledge is a matter of an objective revelation 
from God. This knowledge is just as trustworthy 
as the knowledge gained through the most exact 
sciences, nay, it is more exact and trustworthy. 
What God tells us in the first chapter of Genesis 
as to the origin of living creatures is far more 
reliable than the conclusions of Darwin based 
upon accumulated data gathered during a long 
voyage and pondered for years. Men know more 
about God and heaven and hell, sin and redemp- 
tion and the end of the world and what will hap- 
pen during the endless lapses of eternity, than 
they do about atoms and germs and stars and 
states and business projects. It is naively as- 
sumed that, just as we build up our knowledge of 
our friends or contemporaries through personal 
contacts, so the Christian builds up his knowledge 
of God the Father, Jesus the Redeemer, and the 
Holy Ghost through personal contacts with them. 
In the light of the conclusions reached above, can 
we say the situation is as simple as this? 


SYMBOL AND REALITY 103 


‘‘Life,’’ says Shelley, ‘‘like a dome of many- 
colored glass, stains the white radiance of Hter- 
nity.’’ This beautiful poetic figure expresses a 
profound psychological truth, namely, the essen- 
tially human character of all our knowledge. The 
constructs of the imagination are all merely hu- 
man ways of picturing to ourselves reality. The 
religious and scientific imaginations agree in this 
respect. They differ when we come to examine 
the nature of the realities with which they deal. 
The constructs of the scientific imagination have 
as their counterparts or correlatives external ob- 
jects, the relations of things, sequences of events. 
The fictions of the religious imagination do not 
have any such accessible and measurable external 
reality to which they can be directly referred. 
The locus of religious reality is primarily in the 
emotional experience of the individual. It is per- 
fectly legitimate to objectify the experience and 
postulate transcendental religious realties pro- 
vided we recognize that this is a postulate of 
faith, not an immediate, measurable fact of ex- 
perience. ‘‘No man hath seen God at any time.”’ 
That is to say, granting the existence of the deity, 
the immediate data of experience of him are not 
sensations. But sensations of external objects 
are the raw material out of which are formed the 


104 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


great constructs of the scientific imagination by 
means of which the scientist represents to him- 
self external reality. There are no such imme- 
diate elementary sensations which the religious 
imagination can use. To be sure, we sense re- 
ligious objects as in worship or perhaps in con- 
tacts with phenomena of nature that call out 
religious experiences, but we interpret the ex- 
ternal situation in terms of the subjective expe- 
rience. 

The essence of the religious situation is not 
found in the cognitive data, but in the feelings 
of value, registered in the emotions. That is to 
say, while sensation mediates between the con- 
structs of the scientific imagination and its ob- 
jects it is emotions that mediate between the fic- 
tions of the religious imagination and its objects. 
Now it is a peculiarity of the emotions that they 
do not point beyond themselves, while sensations 
always imply an objective reality. There is, 
therefore, this very puzzling problem that arises 
when we come to deal with religious realities. 
Is the ultimate religious reality merely the emo- 
tional experience, that is to say, is religious real- 
ity essentially subjective and human, or is there 
outside of and transcending this inner emotional 


SYMBOL AND REALITY 105 


experience an objective religious reality? Re- 
ligious experience takes precedence over science 
perhaps in its immediacy and intensity and con- 
vincing power. Religious experience is among 
the most real of all our experiences. Science 
takes precedence over religion in the facility with 
which it can establish the external reality of its 
objects. There is no need of proof for the fac- 
tual existence of the sun or of gravity, but 
libraries have been written to prove the factual 
existence of God. The constructs of the scien- 
tific imagination obviously point beyond them- 
selves; the fictions of the religious imagination 
are not so obviously secondary, presupposing an 
objective spiritual reality. 

The problem of the reality of the objects of 
the religious imagination is further complicated 
by a peculiarity of the emotional life. We have 
seen that religion is interested primarily in value. 
Value is a matter of the emotional tone of a given 
experience. Value is no more found as an inde- 
pendent entity than the color of a brick wall or 
of an oriental rug. It exists only as a component 
part of something else. That is to say, religious 
values, like the colors in the rug, presuppose some 
sort of objectivity, some sort of locus in space 


106 THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 


and time. It follows, therefore, that we always 
tend to give to the values that lie at the heart 
of religion some sort of objectification. We can 
think of them objectively only as associated with 
a spiritual being such as a personal God. Thus 
it is that the objective reality of God seems to 
arise as an implication of our thought and ex- 
perience, not as something that can be immedi- 
ately experienced and proven. ‘T'he only other 
alternative to this is to say that the real locus 
of religious values is found in our own human 
personalities. This would mean of course a com- 
plete humanization of religion. 

An examination of the religious imagination 
thus brings us ultimately face to face with the 
problems of the philosophy of religion. It is per- 
missible, therefore, to suggest in conclusion sey- 
eral problems, the solutions of which belong to 
metaphysics rather than to psychology. The first 
is that the symbols of the religious imagination 
apparently arise to meet the inner subjective 
needs, yet are ever being referred to sources out- 
side the individual. Secondly, the forms of the 
religious imagination, whose primary use is sym- 
bolical, soon arrogate to themselves the réle of 
the constructs of the scientific imagination and 


SYMBOL AND REALITY 107 


become in the case of the devout believer the 
basis of his explanations of the phenomena of 
nature both animate and inanimate. Thus the 
special creation story of Genesis, a pictorial 
representation of the origin of living things by a 
deeply religious but semi-civilized people, is pre- 
ferred to the hypothesis of evolution based upon 
a most painstaking examination of a vast body of 
facts, the very existence of which was never 
dreamed of by the writer of Genesis. Thirdly, 
the objective spiritual reality presupposed by the 
symbols of the religious imagination is not a 
proven but a postulated reality. The very nature 
of such realities is that they are objects of 
faith, not of scientific proof. To prove the ex- 
istence of God as Newton did the law of gravity 
would destroy God’s religious significance. Faith 
implies risk, contingency, the possible unreality 
of its objects. Finally, when a popularization of 
psychological facts has familiarized men with the 
essentially symbolical réle of the religious imagi- 
nation, interesting speculations arise as to the 
fate of traditional religious realities and the réle 
of religion in the society of the future. This is 
the reason for the question, What is the sur- 
vival value of Christianity? 


Chapter Iil 


JESUS OR CHRIST 
Christ is God’s last metaphor.—Bushnell 


Le may be worth while to apply to the figure 
which has occupied the central position in the 
religious imagination of the western world some 
of the conclusions reached in the preceding chap- 
ters. For the problem of fact and fiction in the 
Christian faith is nowhere so vital or so urgently 
debated as in connection with the life of Jesus. 


1. THE JESUS OF HISTORY. 


The great men of history have always enjoyed 
a dual personality. The one is real, the other is 
fictitious. One is the product of the scientific 
imagination of the historian, the other is a fiction 
of the popular imagination. Around such figures 
as Lycurgus, Plato, Alexander, Cesar, Mahomet, 
Charlemagne, Luther, Napoleon, there is always 


a penumbra of legend. This is true even of the 
108 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 109 


men of our own time. There was a short period 
in the public career of Woodrow Wilson when 
the real man was swallowed up in grandiose fic- 
tions of the imagination of a war-torn world. 
He became merely a symbol, a symbol of hope 
to millions whose hearts were broken. ‘The less 
men know about the great figures of the past, 
the more imagination seeks to fill up the gaps in 
our knowledge. When this process is stretched 
over centuries the real person is often lost be- 
neath the accumulations of legend. This is strik- 
ingly illustrated in Plutarch’s Lives, where fact 
and fiction are so hopelessly interwoven as to 
make the historian despair. 

The figure of Jesus of Nazareth is no excep- 
tion. We have in reality two persons, the his- 
torical Jesus, faintly visible beneath the legend- 
ary accumulations of the gospels, and the Christ 
of the fictions of the religious imagination. 
Which of these two personalities has played the 
most important role in the history of Christian- 
ity? If we examine the texture of our western 
civilization to detect the strands that unite it, 
the ideals that give it coherence and purpose, 
the loyalties that have bound together men of 
good will from generation to generation, we 


110 JESUS OR CHRIST 


should say perhaps that Jesus Christ is the most 
stupendous fact of history. So great is the hold 
of Jesus upon the imaginations of millions of 
Americans today that it is possible to pass laws 
making it a crime to teach in state-supported 
schools doctrines contrary to the supposed beliefs 
of Jesus. Yet what we actually know as to the 
life of Jesus could be contained in half a dozen 
printed pages. In the religious imagination of 
mankind Jesus bulks as vast as eternity itself. 
In the field of historical fact the position of Jesus 
is infinitesimally small. He was practically un- 
known to his contemporaries and facts gained by 
the most meticuleus scholarly investigations are 
meager, incoherent, and fragmentary. 

It is quite possible, then, to ask, Which is the 
Jesus men worship today, the Jesus of history 
faintly visible beneath the legendary accumula- 
tions of the gospels or the Christ of the fictions 
of the religious imagination? To many devout 
souls the raising of this question is little short 
of sacrilegious. The ready reply is, ‘‘I know 
in whom I have believed.’’ Quite so. But to 
assert the reality of one’s own inner religious 
experiences is one thing. To identify the symbols 
of the religious imagination by which we repre- 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 111 


sent to ourselves the immediate reality of those 
experiences with the historic reality of Jesus is 
something quite different. The libraries of the 
world are full of beautiful prayers uttered by As- 
syrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to their 
gods. But where now are the gods of Arphar 
and Babylon and Memphis and Athens and Rome? 
What objective reality for the historian have 
Asculapius, Mithras, Cybele, Hermes, or Vesta? 
Yet men prayed to these gods earnestly, confid- 
ingly, and, we may well believe, gained inner 
peace, though the objects of their devotions were 
oure fictions of the religious imagination. Is it 
not possible that the prayers of the men who pray 
today may in many instances have no more of 
an objective historic counterpart than did those 
of the men of antiquity? It is because this is 
possible that there is nothing sacrilegious in rais- 
ing the question of the historicity of Jesus. The 
question has been raised for us by modern criti- 
cism and we are forced to answer it. How far 
is the Jesus we worship fact, and how far fiction? 

Josephus (37-95 a.p), in the eighteenth book 
of his Ancient History of the Jews, says: ‘‘ And 
about that time came Jesus, a wise man, if he may 
be called a man. He was a worker of miracles, a 


112 JESUS OR CHRIST 


teacher of folk who received the truth willingly, 
and he attracted many Jews, many also of the 
Greeks. He was the Christ. When, on the accu- 
sation of those who were the first among us, Pi- 
late had sentenced him to the cross, those who 
had loved him from the beginning continued to 
do so. He appeared to them on the third day re- 
stored to life. God’s prophets predicted this and 
ten thousand other marvels concerning him. 
Even today the sect named Christians continues 
to exist.’? This is obviously an interpolation and 
is so deemed by conservative scholars. It makes 
Josephus, a Jew, practically confess himself a 
Christian, for he concedes such cardinal Chris- 
tian doctrines as the deity of Jesus, the resur- 
rection, miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy. 
There was no good reason why Josephus should 
mention Jesus. His silence is not necessarily 
the silence of ignorance, but that of prudence and 
fear. Being a notorious flatterer and time-server 
of the Romans he would naturally refrain from 
all mention of one whose title ‘‘ King of the Jews”’ 
might arouse suspicion. 

The first indisputable non-Christian reference 
to Christianity occurs in a letter to Emperor 
Trajan written by Pliny the Younger about 105 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 113 


A.D. while he was proconsul of Bithynia and Pon- 
tus. Pliny bears witness to the cult of a god 
Christus, though he does not mention the histor1- 
cal existence of Jesus. He possibly thought of 
Christus as merely one of the numerous cult del- 
ties that abounded in the Empire. Tacitus, in 
book XV, ch. 44, of his Annals (ce. 116 a.p.), says 
in connection with his discussion of the burning 
of Rome under Nero: ‘‘In order to destroy the 
rumor that he was accused of the burning of 
Rome Nero supposed certain guilty ones and 
inflicted upon them excruciating punishments. 
They were those who, hated for their infamies, 
were called by the vulgar crowd Christians.’’ 
Suetonius, the gossipy court historian and gram- 
marian, writing about 121 a.p., mentions one 
Christus who was driven from Rome because of 
his agitations of the Jews. This is a possible 
reference to Christianity. With this we exhaust 
the non-Christian references to Christianity, and 
their value for establishing the historicity of 
Jesus is practically nil. 

Turning from the silence of the pagan writers 
to the New Testament, we find that our oldest 
records are not the gospels which purport to tell 
the story of Jesus, but the letters of Paul. These 


114 JESUS OR CHRIST 


letters are the spontaneous outpourings of soul 
by a great religious leader and mystic, pulsating 
with his personal loves and hates, occasional in 
character, improvised in haste between journeys, 
and never intended to be historical documents. 
Turning to the earliest of these epistles, First 
Thessalonians, the oldest book in the New Testa- 
ment, we find it beginning with these words, 
‘‘Paul and Sylvanus and Timotheus, unto the 
church of the Thessalonians, which is in God the 
Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ.’’ What do 
these words imply? They imply first an eccle- 
siastical organization with officers and cultus and 
an organized and institutionalized body of re- 
ligious sentiments. We are far removed from 
the simple atmosphere of Jesus and his disciples; 
the environment is that of a cult, the head of 
which is a divine being, ‘‘the Lord Jesus Christ.’’ 
More important still we are moving in the atmos- 
phere of a mystical religious imagination. The 
‘‘church”’ is not a definite body localized in space 
and time, but is ‘‘in God the Father and in the 
Lord Jesus Christ.’’ The setting is transferred 
from external reality to an inner world of mys- 
tical enthusiasms, of communion with God. 
Paul never leaves this world of inner mystical 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY V5 


enthusiasms, the world of the religious imagina- 
tion, for the objective world of historical fact 
in dealing with Jesus. Jesus is for him always 
a divine transcendent being, ‘‘the eternal son of 
God,’’ the Lord of glory, ‘‘the second Adam,’’ 
the ‘‘ Alpha and Omega’’ of the universe, all fic- 
tions of the religious imagination. Turn through 
the letters of Paul and you will never find an 
exact, realistic and historical picture of Jesus 
of Nazareth. There are evidences that Paul knew 
the chief facts of the gospel tradition. But he 
was not interested in the Jesus of history. His 
interest lay entirely in the grandiose fictions of 
his own imagination, the preéxistent, risen and 
glorified redeemer of the world. The most com- 
plete description of Jesus that Paul has given 
us is found in Colossians 1:15 ff., where he is 
portrayed as ‘‘the image of the invisible God, 
the firstborn of every creature. For by him were 
all things created that are in heaven and that are 
in the earth, visible and invisible, whether they 
be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or 
powers. All things were created by him and for 
him. And he is before all things and by him 
all things consist. ... For it pleased the Father 
that in him should all fullness dwell.’’ It would 


116 JESUS OR CHRIST 


be a bold exegete indeed who would seek in this 
noble language any of the lineaments of the actual 
historical Jesus. These lineaments were sub- 
merged and lost, being overlaid with the gorgeous 
mental imagery of Paul. Paul was not interested 
in their restoration. Out of the story of the life 
of the man Jesus loomed two things, the cross 
and the empty tomb. The shadow of the cross 
stretched, in the soaring imagination of Paul, 
from the fathomless abysses of eternity across 
the checkered page of history beyond the final 
judgment bar and was lost again in the eternity 
whence it came. The simple brute fact of a Jew 
crucified by Roman soldiers outside the walls of 
Jerusalem took on in his regal imagination cosmic 
significance. In the fierce white light of the trag- 
edy of the cross as he saw it the simple facts of 
the life of Jesus were ignored, the simple ethical 
teachings couched in such matchless parables 
were superseded. 

The liberal critics have sought to penetrate the 
veil of the Pauline imagination and reconstruct 
for us the real Jesus of history. They do not 
realize that the more distinct they make that 
Jesus the more they discredit the Christ of Paul. 
Their Jesus is after all a reconstruction of their 
scholarly imaginations, hardly more real than the 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 117 


titanic figure of the preéxistent Christ of Paul. 
The critics label their fiction ‘‘man’’ while Paul 
labels his ‘‘God.’’ Which is the more worshipful? 
Which makes the stronger appeal to the imagina- 
tion? Shall we elect for the Jesus of the critics, 
‘‘cribb’d, cabin’d and confined’’ though he be, and 
console ourselves with the thought that at least 
we have made ourselves masters of what there is 
to be had of historical facts, or shall we elect 
for the divine figure of the preéxistent Christ who 
is ‘without beginning of days or end of years”’ 
and be content to know that he does not belong 
to the realms of time and space, because he is 
the bloodless fiction of the Pauline imagination? 
This question must be answered before we can 
determine the place of Christianity in modern 
culture. : 

The oldest record of Christianity is found, as 
we have seen, in the epistles of Paul, dating ap- 
proximately from 50 to 62 av. In this earliest 
record we find few or no traces of the historic 
Jesus. What we do find is the story of the re- 
action of a most powerful imagination to a few 
phases of the Christian tradition, especially the 
death and resurrection of Jesus. It will be sur- 
mised, however, that when we turn to the gospels 


118 JESUS OR CHRIST 


themselves, we shall pass from religious fictions 
to trustworthy history. Is this the case? 

There are four gospels; the earliest, Mark, was 
written about 70 a.vp., the latest, John, about 
110 av. The last gospel differs so fundamen- 
tally from the others that it is usually considered 
by itself, the other three or synoptic gospels, 
Mark, Luke and Matthew, being considered as a 
group. We cannot say with certainty that any 
one of these, or in fact that any New Testament 
writing, is from the pen of a personal disciple 
of Jesus. Mark, the oldest of the three, is com- 
plex in origin, being based upon two main sources, 
the one a collection of narratives perhaps derived 
from the preachings of Peter, the other a collec- 
tion or collections of logia or sayings of Jesus 
treasured and handed down at first by word of 
mouth and later in written form. A dozen years 
or so after its original composition the gospel 
of Mark probably underwent a revision, so that 
we do not have it in its original form. The other 
gospels of Luke and Matthew were composed 
from ten to forty years later than Mark, embody- 
ing the material from Mark and the logia, to- 
gether with minor additions from other sources. 
Mark, then, served not only as the main source 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 119 


of the other two synoptic gospels, but suggested 
both their plan and their purpose. Mark is then 
by far the most important of all our sources for 
the historical Jesus. How does Mark approach 
the problem? 

To understand the purpose of Mark and the 
other gospels we must understand what the 
church was thinking and doing when Mark wrote. 
For it was the pragmatic needs of the church, at 
the time Mark wrote, rather than any historical 
interest in the life of Jesus that induced him to 
write at all. When Mark wrote, the church was 
faced with the problem of convincing the world 
of the importance of the life and death and res- 
urrection of Jesus. In other words, what we 
have is not history but missionary propaganda. 
Luke frankly states to Theophilus his purpose in 
writing his gospel, ‘‘That thou mightest know 
the certainty concerning the things wherein thou 
wast instructed.’’ Similarly towards the close of 
his gospel John says: ‘‘These things are written 
that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the 
Son of God; and that believing ye may have life 
in His name’’ (20, 31). Mark and the other 
evangelists were not trying to give an accurate 
historical account of Jesus’ life. They do not 


120 JESUS OR CHRIST 


give us primarily the gospel of Jesus, though the 
teachings of Jesus are incidentally contained in — 
their pages. What they do give us is the gospel 
about Jesus. For already the simple teachings 
of Jesus had been overlaid by the tremendous 
effect upon their imaginations of his death and 
empty tomb. 

What the records give us, then, is not what 
Jesus actually was and only incidentally what he 
actually taught, but what he meant in the light 
of the religious experiences inspired by his wor- 
ship. Certainly, in preaching the saving mission 
of Jesus, men had to connect up his divine mis- 
sion with the facts of his life, for it would be 
natural to expect in the earthly life of Jesus 
some foreshadowing of his Messianic mission. 
This same missionary and pragmatic motive led 
to the emphasis of miracles by Jesus and the 
interlarding of accounts of his life with refer- 
ences to the fulfillment of prophecy and to the 
setting of Jesus above Moses as an interpreter 
of the law. All through the gospel narrative, 
therefore, we can detect the backwash of this 
missionary and apologetic interest which led to 
the stressing of certain events and the minimiz- 
ing of others, to the reading into the words and 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 121 


acts of Jesus ideas foreign to his own mind, 
but born of the immediate pragmatic needs of a 
church evangelizing the world. All the gospels 
are tendency writings, and this is what makes 
their use so difficult for the historian. 

One who seeks in the gospels a history of Jesus 
is doomed to disappointment. The historian 
looks backwards. He seeks to free himself from 
the passions and prejudices, the hopes and the 
fears of the present. His task is to let the men 
of other days stand up and tell their own story 
in their own way. The writers of the gospels 
looked forward, not backward. They expected 
the immediate coming of the Lord, when the 
scheme of salvation they preached would be com- 
pleted and human affairs wound up forever. 
Jesus was for them a living hope, not a dead his- 
torical fact. This burning hope selected from 
his words and works those things that seemed 
to confirm it and rejected those things that 
seemed to negate it. The consequence was that 
the very morning following the discovery of the 
empty tomb Christian theology was born, born 
of the religious imagination seeking symbolic in- 
terpretation of the passionate hopes engendered 
by the story of the empty tomb. Nay, even the 


122 JESUS OR CHRIST 


empty tomb and the risen and glorified Lord 
were creations of this imagination, fictions of the 
human heart demanded for the satisfaction of 
unforgettable impressions of the life and work 
of Jesus. Jesus must not die. He could not die. 
He did not die. He rose from the dead the third 
day and was seen of the brethren. Le ceur a ses 
yaisons que la raison ne connait pas. 

Jesus lived. He was a real fact of history. 
But he never left a line. He wrote only in the 
sand. He has lived in the devout imaginations 
of his followers and their very love and devotion 
to him caused them to overlay the facts of his 
life with subjective impressions of their own, so 
that the actual detailed life of Jesus is lost for- 
ever. In the gospels miracle, legend, symbol, 
prophecy, dogma, and lyrical expressions of in- 
tense religious mysticism have enshrouded the 
figure of Jesus in eternal mystery. Through 
rifts in these figments of the religious imagina- 
tion we catch glimpses, like sunlit Alpine valleys 
seen through the mountain mists, of the inner 
life of Jesus. It is full of pastoral beauty and 
a peace born of singular unity of soul. But these 
glimpses do not suffice for a history of the life 


THE JESUS OF HISTORY 123 


of Jesus. The material from which such a life 
might. have been constructed is lost forever. 
The very plan and outline of his life is a matter 
of surmise and speculation. What we have are 
scattered and disconnected episodes. The prac- 
tical task of the critic is to reproduce these epi- 
sodes with such measure of accuracy as 1s pos- 
sible and thereby to gain, if not a complete life, 
at least a trustworthy idea of his personality and 
his teachings. 

Jesus, therefore, is the eternal paradox of his- 
tory. He belongs to two worlds, the world of 
time and space, and likewise the timeless and 
spaceless world of the religious imagination. 
Like a wandering ghost he slips from one world 
to the other and we are at a loss to know where 
to place him. As the centuries drew on, how- 
ever, the world of imagination more and more 
claimed him as its own, a fact somewhat over- 
stated in the following: ‘‘Though by his name 
and through his worship Jesus belongs to history, 
he is not a historical personage. He has no place 
in the generations of mankind. His existence is 
not of the order of visible things, neither is it 
included among possible facts. It is neither a 


124 JESUS OR CHRIST 

myth nor a symbol, but a spiritual reality, more 
real to the eye of faith than all finite existence. 
Believers alone must judge of it, and on condi- 
tion that they remove it from the domain of the 
historians. We can no longer conceive the Ab- 
solute included in the development of possible 
facts, God as a historical personage: Jesus must 
renounce existence in order to preserve it. He 
is a divine being, knowledge of whom the Chris- 
tian conscience has slowly elaborated. He was 
born of faith, hope, and love. He sprang from 
the human heart’s need of consolation. He has 
assumed varying forms attributed to him by his 
worshipers. He was born as soon as he had a be- 
hever. He grew strong through all the followers 
who came to him, and from whom he took their 
inmost being, of whatever nature, subtle or 
material. He has lived all down the centuries 
and it may be that he will perish only with hu- 
manity. His sole reality is spiritual. EHvery- 
thing else is illusion. He will mislead those who 
follow him to the shores of the Lake of Galilee 
or to the steps of sorrowful Jerusalem. They 
will find there nothing but his followers. He is 
elsewhere, has been from the beginning. He 
dwelleth nowhere, save in human souls. He is not 


THE “SON OF MAN” 125 


to be found in religion’s fabled dawn: he is re- 
ligion itself. The whole history of Christianity 
—that is his history. But he has no biography.’’* 


2. THE ‘‘SON OF MAN.’’ 


As has already been suggested, by far the most 
important factor in the creation of the fictions 
of the religious imagination that grew up around 
the figure of the historic Jesus was the pragmatic 
pressure of emotional needs. Imagination has al- 
ways been the handmaiden of feeling and will. 
It pictures forth in fitting symbols the needs of 
the emotions as those needs arise under the pres- 
sure of events. The powerful emotions and loy- 
alties centering in the person and work of Jesus 
were thrown into fearful chaos by the events of 
the passion week terminating in the crucifixion. 
The hopes inspired by contact with his masterful 
personality seemed broken and crushed forever 
by his shameful death. It is a familiar fact 
of psychology, however, that a tragic disappoint- 
ment of cherished hopes through brute reality is, 
after a period of depression, often followed by 
a reassertion of these hopes. <A defiant ‘‘Never- 


1 Couchoud, The Enigma of Jesus, p. 79. 


126 JESUS OR CHRIST 


theless’? is hurled into the teeth of fate. The 
spirit of man passes from the ‘‘everlasting No’’ 
to the ‘‘everlasting Yea.’’ It escapes from the 
hard, cruel immediacy of the brute facts of the 
world of external reality into the inner world of 
spiritual reality and borne up on the wings of 
imagination attains a pitch of enthusiasm where 
it is able triumphantly to assert that the im- 
possible is possible. ‘‘AIl things are possible 
to him that believeth.’’ . 

The followers of Jesus called on the imagina- 
tion for some sort of escape mechanism, some 
reinterpretation of the facts, some new and soul- 
satisfying symbols by means of which they could 
turn defeat into victory. Here is the supreme 
role of the imagination and it is nowhere more 
nobly exercised than in the field of religion. The 
fictions the early Christian imagination threw 
around the figure of Jesus were not the results 
of cool ratiocination. They were not the specu- 
lative fancies of the philosopher nor yet the fic- 
tions of the theologian’s brain. They sprang 
from life. They reflected universal needs of the 
human heart. To this they owe their perennial 
freshness and their truth. 

In searching among the traditional symbols of 


THE “SON OF MAN” a7 


the religious imagination of the Jew for some- 
thing that would fit their immediate needs, the 
little Jerusalem group of Jesus’ followers would 
naturally be attracted by the fascinating story of 
the coming of a Messiah, upon which the purest 
religious hopes of the nation were based. The 
fictions of the religious imagination of the Jew 
associated with the idea of the Messiah were of 
two main types. The religious imagination of 
the masses pictured the Messiah as the ‘‘Son of 
David’’ who would come as a mighty prince, crush 
the power of the hated Roman, and establish at 
Jerusalem a kingdom of righteousness and holi- 
ness that would extend to the uttermost parts 
of the earth. Opposed to this crude and im- 
perialistic picture of the masses was the more re- 
fined and spiritual ideal of the Messiah as a 
transcendental and other-world being, affiliated 
with the bright, celestial life of the angels, though 
never made co-equal with God, who in the fullness 
of time was to come to judge the earth. This 
latter more refined fiction of the religious imagi- 
nation was called the ‘‘Son of Man.’’ 

The stern logic of events determined which of 
these two types of the religious imagination would 
best fit the emotional needs of the Jerusalem 


128 JESUS OR CHRIST 


group struggling with the problem of the life and 
death of Jesus. The manner of Jesus’ taking off, 
not to mention other factors, precluded the ap- 
plication to him of the cruder form of the reli- 
cious imagination. The pious imagination of the 
Jerusalem group, therefore, turned to the celes- 
tial figure of the ‘‘Son of Man’’ portrayed in 
Daniel and Ezra. The Christ of the religious im- 
agination thus inherited at once the eschatological 
and catastrophic atmosphere surrounding the 
figure of the ‘‘Son of Man.’’ The ‘‘Son of Man’? 
was to come again in clouds and glory surrounded 
by all his angels and erect a judgment bar before 
which all peoples of the earth were to be assem- 
bled. They pictured his coming like a thief in 
the night for suddenness. The tension of this 
impending catastrophe engendered feelings that 
found expression in emotional excesses. Jets of 
flame sat upon their heads as they talked and 
communed together. Individuals spoke in unin- 
telligible tongues. Many prophesied and per- 
formed miracles. These pneumatological phe- 
nomena, parallels to which are to be found in the 
emotional excesses of religious revivals such as 
the Great Awakening in this country, reached 
such a pitch that they had to be controlled. What 


THE “SON OF MAN” 129 


it is important to remember is the effect of this 
intense emotional environment upon the develop- 
ment of the religious imagination. It provided 
a congenial and stimulating setting for the play 
of this imagination over the life and death of 
Jesus in a search for symbols that would fittingly 
interpret present pressing emotional needs. 

Among the fictions of the Jewish imagination 
associated with the term ‘‘Son of Man’’ was that 
of a pre-mundane existence. Here we have po- 
tentially contained all the tremendous role played 
by the Christ of the speculations of the theological 
imagination during the great Christological con- 
troversies of the first three or four centuries. It 
is interesting to note, however, that in the earliest 
tradition, as suggested in Mark, Luke, and Mat- 
thew, we have no clear-cut reference to a pre-mun- 
dane existence, the cryptic utterance of Luke 10- 
18, being excepted. This suggests that the mem- 
ory of the earthly life of Jesus was still fresh in 
the minds of men so that the wings of the reli- 
gious imagination were handicapped by a vivid 
sense of the historic reality. 

Most important for the evolution of the reli- 
gious imagination, therefore, is the fact that the 
Fourth Gospel, much farther removed in time 


130 JESUS OR CHRIST 


from the historical Jesus and thoroughly imbued 
with the speculative Hellenistic spirit and more 
or less under the fascinating spell of the fictions 
of the Pauline imagination, finds its orientation 
entirely in terms of the fiction of a pre-mundane 
being who ‘‘descended out of heaven,’’ was ‘‘with 
the Father,’’ and ‘‘abideth forever.’’ This gos- 
pel begins with a hymn of praise to the eternal 
Logos who inhabits eternity and ends with the 
assertion that the book was written to prove that 
Jesus was the Christ, ‘‘the eternal Son of God.’’ 

In the construction of the picture of the ‘‘Son 
of Man,’’ miracle played an important role. It is 
generally recognized that miracle is an integral 
part of the historical tradition as to Jesus. It 
occurs in the logza, or oldest sources, although the 
emphasis is laid more upon the moral and reli- 
gious teachings of Jesus than upon his miracles. 
Jesus undoubtedly exercised a powerful psy- 
chological influence over the mentally deranged 
and it was perfectly natural that these acts, which 
permit of a scientific explanation, should have 
been looked upon as supernatural. In the reli- 
gious imagination of the Jew, however, the com- 
ing of the ‘‘Son of Man’’ was to be accompanied 
by many supernatural phenomena. When the 


THE “SON OF MAN” 131 


historic Jesus became affiliated with this mental 
picture of the ‘‘Son of Man,’’ with his supernat- 
ural accompaniments, it was natural that miracle 
should assume added importance. Everything 
that Jesus touched came to be suffused with the 
golden glow of the miraculous. For the more the 
imagination surrounded the figure of Jesus with 
this miraculous atmosphere, the easier it was to 
fit him into the celestial and supernatural role of 
the ‘‘Son of Man.’’ Signs and wonders and 
mighty works became sign manuals of the prom- 
ised Messiah. Miracle thus became a powerful 
means by which the post-resurrection imagina- 
tion of the Jerusalem group shaped the gospel 
story of Jesus to meet their immediate pragmatic 
needs. 

In its enthusiastic transformation of the figure 
of the historic Jesus the post-resurrection imag- 
ination of the Jerusalem community was in con- 
stant danger of being contradicted by the actual 
facts. The fiction of the celestial ‘‘Son of Man,’’ 
whose earthly pilgrimage is filled with miracu- 
lous manifestations of divine power is contra- 
dicted, not only by his death, but also by his sig- 
nal failure to convince his own people that he was 
the promised Messiah. 


132 JESUS OR CHRIST 


This difficulty is met by introducing into the 
picture of Jesus the much discussed Messianic se- 
erecy. The writers of the gospels picture Jesus 
as being aware of his Messianic role, but conceal- 
ing it from the people. They thus make him di- 
rectly responsible for the failure of his own peo- 
ple to receive him. This seems not only to com- 
promise his moral and intellectual honesty, but 
likewise to reflect upon the limits of his divine 
power. It is crude apologetics. But it was far 
more important to the Christian community that 
the historical Jesus should symbolize to them all 
the great religious values, for which as the ‘‘Son 
of Man’’ he had come to stand in the post-resur- 
rection imagination, than that there should be 
preserved for posterity a scientific and histori- 
cally trustworthy account of his life. 

The world has gained thereby a vast and ines- 
timable addition to its store of the symbols of the 
religious imagination, but the task of the historian 
of Jesus has been made so difficult as almost to 
drive him to despair. 

The role assigned to the devils cast out by 
Jesus is interesting in this connection. The de- 
mons, as belonging to that supernatural world to 
which the ‘‘Son of Man’’ belonged, were endowed, 


THE “SON OF MAN” 133 


according to the popular imagination, with keener 
insight into spiritual verities than the masses. 
This fact is made use of in drawing the picture of 
the ‘‘Son of Man’”’ and Jesus is represented as 
charging those from whom devils had been cast 
out to tell no one the truth about him. The apol- 
ogetic motive thus introduces an element that 
actually distorts the figure of the historic Jesus. 
This element of concealment is foreign to the 
spirit of the real Jesus. To explain the lack of 
success of Jesus’ teachings, he is also represented 
as purposely making use of parables, the true 
meaning of which he did not wish the people to 
get, but reserved for the inner circles of his dis- 
ciples. Such intellectual duplicity agrees neither 
with the character of Jesus himself nor with the 
nature of the parables themselves. It was intro- 
duced to preserve the integrity of the fiction of the 
celestial ‘‘Son of Man’’ from the disintegrating 
effect of the facts of history, and particularly the 
failure of the teachings of Jesus to convert his 
own people. 

Perhaps the most effective means used by the 
apologetic post-resurrection imagination to fur- 
ther its fiction of the ‘‘Son of Man,’’ was the ful- 
filment of prophecy. From the earliest times 


134 JESUS OR CHRIST 


miracle and prophecy have been the evidences of 
religious leadership and power. The temptation, 
therefore, for the religious imagination of the 
early Christians, and especially the Jerusalem 
group, to seek in the rich storehouse of Old Tes- 
tament prophecy confirmation for the fiction of the 
‘‘Son of Man’’ was irresistible. Important and 
spectacular events in the life of Jesus, such as his 
birth, death, resurrection and glorified celestial 
existence, would naturally be forecast in prophecy. 
Karly the pious imagination capitalized Isaiah’s 
language, ‘‘For unto us a child is born, ete.”’ 
Undoubtedly the famous passage in this same 
prophet, ‘‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear 
a son and shall call his name Immanuel,’’ pro- 
foundly influenced the formulation of the dogma 
of the virgin birth. Matthew acknowledges how 
it influenced his account of the nativity of Jesus, 
as he expressly states in chapter 1, verse 23, where 
this passage 1s quoted. 

The influence of Psalm 110 is distinctly evident 
in the imaginative portrayal of the resurrection 
and glorification of Jesus. Psalm 2:7, ‘‘Thou 
art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee,’’ 
served not only to strengthen the dogma of the 
virgin birth, but helped to solve the later trini- 


THE “SON OF MAN” 135 


tarian problem of the relation of Jesus as a 
cult god to the one God of the Jew. Prophecy 
most of all things enabled the religious imagina- 
tion to ennoble the shameful, disastrous death 
on the cross. The evangelists one and all 
preached that the ‘‘Son of Man must suffer and 
die and rise again the third day.’’ The imme- 
diate basis of this ‘‘must’’ was of course the 
religious needs of the post-resurrection period. 
But Paul and later theologians projected this 
‘“must’’ into the very structure and purpose of 
the universe. There was nothing so effective in 
giving carrying power to this ‘‘must’’ as the ful- 
fillment of prophecy. 

Prophecies, too, are responsible for the filling 
in of details in the record of the life of Jesus. 
Psalm 22 undoubtedly suggested such details in 
the story of the crucifixion as the casting of lots 
by the soldiers for Jesus’ clothing, the reviling of 
passers-by, and the ery, ‘‘My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?’’ That there should have 
been so many remarkable similarities between 
the events of the crucifixion and incidents of 
prophecy is improbable. The pious imagination 
filled in the details of the dramatic death of the 
beloved leader and teacher, using the familiar 


136 JESUS OR CHRIST 


language of the prophets. Just where we are to 
draw the line between actual fact and the inter- 
calations of the devout imagination, scholarship 
will perhaps never determine accurately. 

Thus did the pious imagination of the early 
Jerusalem community labor ingenuously and with 
self-immolating devotion to perfect for all time 
the life picture of their Divine Master. It was 
an idealization, but the picture was of immeas- 
urable importance, for it was to predetermine 
the history of Christian piety for two thousand 
years. It has been said, ‘‘What religion a man 
Shall have is a historical accident.’’ But it is 
an open question whether without this idealiza- 
tion, this transformation of Jesus of Nazareth 
into the Christ, ‘‘the hope of glory,’’ he would 
ever have been heard of again in history. Fur- 
thermore, it is an open question whether, if we 
had all the earthly details of the historical Jesus 
in documented historical array, the Jesus of the 
synoptics, Paul and John, would ever have been 
possible. It would seem that great figures in 
the history of religion are never sure of immor- 
tality until they have been canonized as symbols 
of the religious imagination. Behind the can- 
onizations of the saints by the Roman Catholic 


THE “SON OF MAN” 137 


Church lies a profound sociological insight, for 
this preserves them from the canker of time and 
the acid of historical criticism. 

The Jesus of the Christian faith is safe from 
the critics. His citizenship is in a world where 
the historical critic is not concerned to take out 
naturalization papers. ‘‘It was first when the 
community placed behind the gospel of Jesus this 
figure of the celestial ‘Son of Man,’ the ruler and 
world-judge . . . it was first when the picture of 
the wandering preacher was sketched upon the 
golden background of the miraculous and woven 
around with the glory of fulfilled prophecy and 
invested with the charm of a half-concealed se- 
crecy, it was first when they embodied in him a 
vast, divine story of salvation, and made him its 
crown and fulfillment that they succeeded in mak- 
ing the picture of Jesus of Nazareth effective. 
For the purely historical is never convincing, but 
only the living present symbol in which the int- 
mate uluminated religious conviction reveals itself 
[italics the author’s]. And an age which is un- 
able to live upon the bare moral or religious, but 
requires all sorts of more or less fantastic escha- 
tological expectations, beliefs in miracles and 
prophecies, an immediate and unheard-of inter- 


188 JESUS OR CHRIST 


vention of God in the course of nature and of 
history, in all sorts of ways of healing, in mes- 
siahs, in devils and demons and in the imminent 
triumph of God and his own over hostile powers 

. Such an age needs such a picture of Jesus as 
the first disciples created, enshrining the eternal 
in the colorful shell of the temporal.’’? 


3. THE LORD OF GLORY 


The ‘‘Son of Man’’ of the Jerusalem group was 
an eschatological phenomenon and sprang from 
Jewish tradition. He was essentially a hope. 
His Jewish followers had transferred to Jesus 
the precious dreams of their race. He had dis- 
appeared into the mysterious and celestial realm 
of the ‘‘Son of Man’’ and with tense expectation 
they awaited his coming again on the clouds in 
elory to set all things to rights. We are still far 
from the conception of Jesus as redeemer and 
incarnated only begotten Son of God, co-equal 
with the Father in power and glory. We have 
now to trace the contributions made by the im- 
agination of the gentile group to the figure of the 


2 W. Bousset: Kurios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens 
von den Anfingen des Christenthums bis auf lreneus, pp. 74 f. 


THE LORD OF GLORY 139 


Christ. Their spokesman and interpreter is the 
apostle to the gentiles, Paul. 

Paul, more than any other figure, illustrates 
the paradox that lies at the heart of early Chris- 
tianity. For Paul Jesus was a historic fact. The 
Lord of glory did actually take on himself human 
flesh and tabernacle among men. The Pauline 
doctrine of salvation through the cross imperi- 
ously demands the historicity of the cross and 
the humanity of Jesus. Yet Paul’s interest lies 
wholly with the risen Christ, the glorified Re- 
deemer. He worships the Lord of glory, not the 
son of the carpenter Joseph. Paul, therefore, 
presents a most interesting paradox. He presup- 
poses the real historic Jesus who died on the 
cross, and yet his whole attention is directed to 
the preéxistent and transcendental figure of the 
Redeemer. Paul’s faith is rooted in fact and yet 
lives in the constructs of the religious imagina- 
tion. Which for Paul was the real Jesus, the 
man of Galilee or the Lord of glory, the objective 
facts of history or the symbols of his immediate, 
vibrating religious experience? A candid exam- 
ination of Paul’s letters will convince any one 
that for Paul, as for all the great mystics, the 


8’ Romans 8:3; Galatians 3:3. 


140 JESUS OR CHRIST 


real basis of religious realities lay in his subjec- 
tive religious experiences. That Paul projected 
the symbols of this inner experience into the great 
beyond, that he pictured in vivid fashion a vast 
world-drama having as its center the cross of 
Christ, that he wove round that cross a cosmic 
philosophy embracing in its sweep the origin and 
destiny of man, angels and devils, that he made 
these tremendous fictions of his imagination the 
basis for distorted conceptions of human nature 
and society, need not blind us to the fact that he 
was always tirelessly seeking adequate symbols 
for inner verities, he was interpreting the spirit- 
ual drama within his own soul. 

When Paul said, ‘‘I know in whom I have be- 
lieved,’’? he did not have in mind the objective 
facts as to Jesus, for his writings betray only the 
most superficial knowledge of those facts. He 
did not believe because he had exact scientific 
knowledge. Had he had such knowledge belief 
would have been unnecessary, even impossible. 
He knew because he believed. That is to say, the 
real basis of his belief was subjective, not objec- 
tive, emotional and mystical, not historical and 
scientific. Paul thus becomes the great prototype 
of the Christian imagination. He forecast in his 


THE LORD OF GLORY 141 


own religious experience the path millions were to 
follow. He is the connecting link between the 
fragmentary account of the gospels and the vast 
superstructure of Christian faith, the house of 
many mansions, which the religious imagination 
was to erect during all the centuries to follow. 

These vivid mystical experiences of Paul, in- 
eluding the revolutionary vision on the way to 
Damascus and many others, together with the im- 
aginative symbols that grew out of them, could 
not have originated in a social or psychological 
vacuum. The development of the Pauline imag- 
ination presupposes some social milieu, some defi- 
nite social setting that could provide the means 
for disciplining and shaping his ideas. The cor- 
relative of Paul’s mystical faith in the erucified, 
risen, and glorified Lord Jesus Christ was the 
gentile Christian community with its common 
body of religious experiences growing out of the 
worship of Jesus, their cult hero. 

Paul says, after the vision on the way to Da- 
mascus, ‘‘I went into Arabia.’’? If we date his 
conversion at 33 a.p., this period of retirement in 
the wilderness lasted possibly two years. After 
his return to Jerusalem in 36 we have a long 
period of quiet growth and development, of some 


142 JESUS OR CHRIST 


ten years spent among the gentile Christians. 
During all this time the powerful imagination 
of Paul was playing over the vivid experiences 
of his conversion and formulating those symbols 
of the religious imagination, which later were te 
form the content of his message to the gentiles. 
The gentile group offered during this period the 
social reality for Paul’s mystical imagery. Out 
of the worship of Jesus as the cult deity of this 
gentile group gradually took shape Paul’s titanic 
conception of the préexistent, divine redeemer, the 
Lord Jesus Christ. ; 
The favorite title applied by Paul and the gen- 
tile group to the resurrected Jesus was ‘‘Lord’’ 
(Kiptos ). The term ‘‘Son of Man’’ by which the 
Jerusalem Christians described the resurrected 
Jesus was unknown to the gentiles. It was Jew- 
ish. The term kurios, furthermore, was not taken 
from the Jerusalem group. In the oldest synop- 
tic gospel, Mark, the term kurios occurs only once, 
and in a sense entirely different from that used 
by Paul. In Luke and Acts, where Pauline influ- 
ence is in evidence, it is found more frequently. 
Whence did Paul and the gentile group get this 
term and why did they apply it to Jesus? The 
explanation of the selection by Paul and the gen- 


THE LORD OF GLORY 148 


tile group of the term ‘‘Lord’’ must be sought, 
just as in the case of the selection of the term 
‘‘Son of Man’’ by the Jerusalem group, in the so- 
cial background. When Paul wrote using the term 
‘‘Lord’’ it had already back of it a long period 
of development, gentile and Christian. The risen 
Jesus had been elevated naturally and spontane- 
ously by the gentile group to the position of a 
deity. The psychological and social correlative 
of the term ‘‘Lord Jesus’? when Paul wrote was 
the very real, organized and institutionalized pi- 
ety of the gentile Christians. The phrase ‘‘ Lord 
Jesus’’ stood for a definite body of religious sen- 
timents together with a cultus. What was there 
in the religious heritage of the gentile group 
which led them to apply to Jesus, after his eleva- 
tion to the role of cult deity, the term ‘‘Lord’’? 
_ The traveler who studies the Roman Forum 
finds still in place the foundations of an an- 
cient temple erected for the worship of, Julius 
Cesar. The cult of the reigning emperors, des- 
tined to play such an important part in the poli- 
cies of imperial Rome, was an importation from 
the Hast. The vast gap between the oriental des- 
pot and his subject bred in the latter a spirit of 
religious veneration. The valleys of the Nile and 


144 JESUS OR CHRIST 


the Tigris abound in monuments showing that 
men thought their kings were incarnations of del-. 
ties. Alexander as conqueror of the Hast fell heir 
to this worship of the sovereign. When Augustus 
ended the long period of bloody wars with a pax 
romana that was world-wide, it is small wonder 
that grateful nations dubbed him divus Augus- 
tus. Augustus cleverly capitalized this religious 
devotion to strengthen his power, so that worship 
of the reigning emperor was made part of ‘‘one 
hundred per cent’’ loyalty. Pliny says in his fa- 
mous letter to Trajan in 105 that those Christians 
who stubbornly refused to offer sacrifices and 
pour out libations of wine to the waxen images of 
the emperor he ordered to be executed (perse- 
verantes duci jussi).* The psychological effect of 
this widespread emperor-cult can hardly be over- 
estimated. It accustomed men to seeing in out- 
standing personalities the incarnation of deity. 
It satisfied the heart-hunger for immediate and 
tangible contacts with the divine. It schooled 
the popular imagination to associate salvation and 
religious peace of mind, not with some remote and 


4The writer has discussed this letter more in detail in a doc- 
tor’s dissertation, Hadrian’s Rescript an Minicius Fundanus, 
Leipzig, 1900. 


THE LORD OF GLORY 145 


transcendent being, but with a god present in hu- 
man form and subject more or less to the physical 
limitations of human existence. 

Kurios (Lord), Paul’s favorite term for the 
elorified Jesus, was the term applied to deified 
rulers. It was used of the Ptolemies of Egypt, of 
the tyrant Tiberius, the fool Caligula, and the 
monster Nero. The Roman official who presided 
at the martyrdom of Polyearp was amazed that he 
would rather die than use the term kurios of the 
reigning emperor. It may be objected that this 
political use of the term can have little or no 
bearing upon the use of the term by the small 
struggling sect of Christians. This might be true 
if this political usage stood alone. But we find 
that the term kurios enjoyed a very general use 
in connection with deities who were in close and 
intimate contact with the daily lives of the masses. 
Thanks to the intermingling of cultures in the 
Roman Empire, a perfect welter of cults arose 
with their special heroes and heroines enjoying 
every phase of deification. The term was used of 
Artemis of Ephesus and the Great Mother Cybele, 
whose cult was widespread. It was used of Isis, 
Serapis, Hermes. It was applied to AXsculapius. 
In general, the history of the term seems to show 


146 JESUS OR CHRIST 


that it was reserved to characterize the most inti- 
mate and vital religious loyalties of the group. 
This, then, is the setting through which we 
are to understand the meaning of the term kurios 
as applied by the gentile imagination to the 
Christ. We have to picture to ourselves the im- 
aginations of these gentile Christians seizing 
upon a term, already enjoying a familiar reli- 
gious and social significance in the gentile world, 
and using it to symbolize what the Christ had 
come to mean to them. At this stage it would be 
misleading to ascribe to the term kurios any defi- 
nite theological connotation. It was not ex-cogi- 
tated from a theologian’s brain. It was born of 
need. It was the adopted child of use and wont. 
The gentile Christians lived and moved in commu- 
nities accustomed to cult gods and cult ‘‘lords.’’ 
What more natural than that they should adopt 
this term to describe the deified Jesus to whom 
they prayed? Says Paul, ‘‘And if there are so- 
called gods, either in heaven or on earth, as 
there are many gods and many ‘lords’ so we 
have one God and Father and one ‘Lord Jesus 
Christ.’ ’’?® Note that in this passage the ‘‘Lord’”’ 
Jesus Christ is put in the same class with other 
5 T Corinthians 8:15, 


THE LORD OF GLORY 147 


‘“tords,’’ he is worshiped as divine, he is not made 
co-equal with the Father or the one supreme God. 
We have not yet Trinitarianism. 

It is obvious, then, that we are to place back of 
Paul’s mystical ‘‘in the Lord’’ the objective re- 
ality of a kurios cult with its rites and organi- 
zation and group consciousness. Paul’s letters 
show that this group life provided him with the 
objective reality through which he himself sought 
to visualize the mystical experiences suggested by 
the phrase ‘‘in the Lord.’’ The little group of 
believers was the only tangible earthly manifesta- 
tion of this transcendent and glorified fiction of 
Paul’s imagination. Christ is the head of which 
the church is the body, says Paul (I Cor. 12; 
Rom. 12). Here is the concrete factual manifes- 
tation of the ‘‘in the Lord.’’ ‘To Paul’s heaven- 
storming imagination groping after spiritual re- 
alities the phrase ‘‘in the Lord’’ was no figure 
of speech. It described a reality. Christ was 
factually present in the pious enthusiasms of the 
group gathered for his worship. The pneumato- 
logical phenomena that accompanied these gath- 
erings were proof of that. 

We can now state what was Paul’s unique con- 
tribution to the religious imagination of early 


148 JESUS OR CHRIST 


Christianity. He hypostatized the symbols of 
group experience. He clothed the fictions of his 
imagination, shaped by the experiences of the 
Christian community, with eternal and trans- 
eendental thinghood. In so doing Paul laid the 
basis for that vast .structure of Christian the- 
ology which during the next three or four centu- 
ries, after long and acrimonious debates, was to 
rise in stately splendor upon the shifting and 
yet eternally human basis of religious feeling and 
emotion. In these mystical creations of the 
Pauline imagination the historic Jesus seemed 
lost forever. It was not necessarily a loss. It 
was more of a gain. The mere fact of the cru- 
cifixion of Jesus outside the walls of Jerusalem 
would never have stirred the imagination of the 
pagan world. Paul lifted Jesus above the bru- 
tal reality, gave him a regal setting in a trans- 
cendental world, and transformed him into a sym- 
bol of hopes as enduring as the life of the race. 
The historic Jesus died and was buried. No one 
knows where. The Christ of Paul will never 
die and as often as the critics think that he is 
dead, he astounds and discomfits them by rising 
again from the grave in which the critics have 
laid him. 


THE LORD OF GLORY 149 


By dramatizing Jesus’ tragic death Paul made 
him immortal. The picture of a suffering and 
dying and risen god was already familiar to the 
pagan world through the myths associated with 
the Babylonian Tammuz, the Syrian Adonis, the 
Egyptian Osiris, and the Greek Dionysus. With- 
out this imaginative transformation of the cross 
Christianity would never have survived the shame 
of Calvary. By this stroke of imaginative genius 
Paul at once lifted Jesus out of his narrow Jewish 
environment and made him the possession of all 
time. He became the symbol of the dearest hopes 
of the pagan world. He symbolized the emanci- 
pation of mortal men from the hopeless cycle of 
birth, death, and oblivion. The God-man triumph- 
ing over the grave became symbolic of the struggle 
of every soul against moral defeat and spiritual 
death. 

It is perhaps a thankless task to point out the 
elements of doubtful value introduced into the 
Christian imagination by Paul. His extreme 
mysticism tended to negate the objective series 
of reality. Whatever we may say of Paul the 
Christian organizer, Paul the theologian was 
conspicuously lacking in saving common sense. 
Since Paul’s thought moved entirely in the at- 


150 JESUS OR CHRIST 


mosphere of the glorified Christ it was envel- 
oped in a penumbra of crude supernaturalism 
that peopled the world with principalities and 
powers, devils and demons. Paul paved the way 
for two of the darkest pages of Christian theol- 
ogy. His doctrine of predestination is incom- 
patible with the dignity and integrity of the 
human will and his dogma of original sin is a 
grotesque absurdity in the light of modern psy- 
chology. The logical results of these two doc- 
trines would be a fatalistic pessimism. Finally, 
Paul split the world into a hopeless dualism which 
extended from the inner struggle between flesh 
and spirit to the cosmic contest between God and 
his angels and the devil with the world of demons. 
These elements of the Pauline imagination un- 
doubtedly added to the dramatic power of his 
teaching. They are still used with more or less 
effect by popular evangelists such as the Rev. 
‘‘Billy’’? Sunday. -Paul’s lurid picture of a uni- 
verse filled with principalities and powers, with 
devils and demons, with angels and archangels, 
blackened and scarred by the unspeakable wicked- 
ness of human nature, menaced by the final judg- 
ment and the fires of an eternal hell, suited the 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 151 


age in which Paul lived but no longer appeals to 
the modern man. 


4, ‘*‘anD THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELT 
AMONG US.”’’ 


In the Pauline imagination fact is lost in sym- 
bol. The events of the life of the man Jesus are 
assumed and then immediately transcended. One 
fact 1s made central, namely, the cross. Around 
it the powerful imagination of Paul weaves a 
drama of cosmic import, drawing inspiration 
from his own rich mystical experiences and 
seeking his symbols in the life of the gentile group 
of Christians and his past rabbinical training. 
It is obvious that the Pauline imagination tended 
to strip Jesus of all factual reality. His short 
pilgrimage seems like a tragic dream, the earthly 
sojourn of a divinely lovely and suffering ghost. 
This was in fact taught by the first of the long 
line of heretics, namely, the Docetists. The writer 
of the fourth gospel, though profoundly influ- 
enced by the spell of the Pauline imagination, 
seems to have recognized its danger. He felt in- 
stinctively that the fictions of the religious imagi- 


152 JESUS OR CHRIST 


nation, to be effective, must be anchored in real- 
ity. That is to say, religious experiences: must 
always find their best symbols in daily life. In 
some ways John was more spiritual, more subtly 
metaphysical and transcendental than Paul. But 
he possessed the power of clothing subtle religious 
values in the familiar dress of daily life. For 
him the events of Jesus’ life were both facts and 
symbols. 

The author of the Fourth Gospel had brooded 
over the events of Jesus’ life until they had be- 
come suffused with the rich coloring of his own 
rare piety. So fascinated was he with the re- 
ligious values here suggested that his mystical 
imagination deals very freely and uncritically 
with these events. They were molded to suit the 
exigencies of this mystically sensitive and poetic 
piety. The result is a beautiful prose poem in 
which incidents in the life of Jesus, some histor- 
ical, others fictions of the poetic imagination, are 
made to be the vehicles of transcendental verities 
sensed by a delicately balanced mystical soul. 
‘Thus it is that whereas the comparatively im- 
personal narrative of the synoptics has kept us 
the priceless record of a real Person who lives 
and grows within the world of time, here it is 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 153 


a being at once personal and metaphysical—mys- 
terious and remote, yet intimate and dear—whom 
the genius of John puts before us. It is the fruit 
of his own vision and meditation, his own first- 
hand experience of the divine which he pours into 
the evangelical mold.’’ ° 

Here is a mental atmosphere which it is im- 
possible for the modern critical and sophisticated 
mind to grasp. This beautiful epic, in spite of 
its poetry, its spiritual loftiness, its moving ten- 
derness and depth of insight, strikes us as some- 
thing almost too subtly and ethereally spiritual 
‘‘for human nature’s daily food,’’ that is to say, 
it is too supernatural. The fourth Gospel is by 
all odds the most supernatural book in the entire 
Bible. The wonderful prologue, 1: 1-18, like the 
blast of the herald’s trumpet announcing the rise 
of the curtain of the drama, pictures the pre- 
existent beatific life of the eternal Word with 
God before the world was, ‘‘full of grace and 
truth.’’? The first scene is the baptism where the 
dramatic figure of John the Baptist is entirely 
subordinated to the glorious personality of the 
son of God, quite contrary to the older synoptic 
story, and John is made to say, ‘‘ Behold the Lamb 

6 Underhill, The Mystic Way, p. 225. 


154 JESUS OR CHRIST 


of God that taketh away the sin of the world.’’ 
In the beautiful story of the marriage in Cana 
of Galilee the heaven-sent hero of the Johannine 
imagination proclaims his divine power by turn- 
ing water into wine and we are expressly informed 
the reason for it. “‘This beginning of his signs 
did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his 
glory.’? The very words and looks of Jesus were 
miraculous events. At the mere sound of this 
divine voice a whole ‘‘cohort of soldiers’’ (500!), 
and their officers were so confounded that they 
‘‘went backward and fell to the ground.’’ The 
trembling Jesus of the synoptics, who in unspeak- 
able agony of soul sweated great drops of blood 
in Gethsemane, is gone, and the divine Son of 
God goes to his doom with godlike composure. 
When his enemies seek to lay hands upon him 
he eludes them with all the ease of an impalpable 
spirit. He reads the mind of the traitor Judas 
like an open book and with the quiet omniscience 
of a god says, ‘‘That thou doest, do quickly.’’ 
Nothing gives us a clearer insight into the sub- 
tle supernatural and spiritual atmosphere of this 
book than the idea that the mere sight of the 
incarnated Son of God assures eternal life. The 
narrative begins with the pregnant phrase, ‘‘And 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 155 


we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten, 
full of grace and truth.’’ It continues, ‘‘For this 
is the will of my Father that every one that be- 
holdeth the Son and believeth on him shall have 
eternal life.’? The final consummation is sug- 
gested in I John 3:2, ‘‘Beloved, now are we the 
children of God, and it is not yet made manifest 
what we shall be. We know that if he shall be 
manifested we shall be like him for we shall see 
him as he is.’’ The wonder-working effect of the 
sight of the Son of God is that the believer shall 
take on the form of God himself and be endowed 
with eternal life. This idea is Greek in its ante- 
cedents. In the great mystery cults, such as that 
at Eleusis just outside Athens and in the later 
Isis cult, the culmination of long periods of prep- 
aration through fasting, purifications and penance 
was a face-to-face vision of the deity. In de- 
scribing the cult of Isis, Apuleius says, ‘‘I trod 
the borders of death, I stood on the threshold of 
Proserpine... about midnight I saw the sun 
shining in translucent beam, I appeared before 
the upper and lower deities face to face and in 
intimate contact offered my prayers.’’’ 

Not the least amazing feature of John’s narra- 

7 Metam, XI, 23. 


156 JESUS OR CHRIST 


tive, however, is that its supernaturalism seems 
natural. There is nothing strained about it. The 
picture, miracles and all, is an artistic whole. 
We touch here a high point in the history of the 
religious imagination. So consummate is this 
art that we never get the impression of the magi- 
cal or the ghostly. A mass of concrete situations 
are given with a realism that is surprising, even 
in the case of events, such as the raising of Laza- 
rus, which are obviously fictions. This divine be- 
ing thirsts and asks a wayward Samaritan woman 
for water. He weeps at the grave-side of his dead 
friend Lazarus. He is actually tried, condemned, 
and crucified. He calls his followers friends, not 
serfs. John has accomplished the seemingly im- 
possible. He has taken the Lord of glory of the 
Pauline imagination and given him a concrete set- 
ting in space and time, something Paul could not 
do or was not interested in doing. He has ush- 
ered upon the earthly scene a mysterious meta- 
physical abstraction, the eternal Logos, and yet 
he has done it with such realistic skill that we 
are almost inclined to forget the paradox and ex- 
claim ecce homo and also ecce deus. 

How was it possible for the religious imagina- 
tion to have created this artistic synthesis of the 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 157 


divine and the human? It would be impossible 
to draw such a picture today. We are too pain- 
fully conscious of the gap between the divine 
and the human. We are too sophisticated, too 
critically minded, too deeply imbued with the sci- 
entific spirit. The key to the enigma is that the 
integrity, the sincerity, and the truth of all great 
creations of the artistic as well as of the religious 
imagination are reflections of their age. One who 
studies the face of the Hermes of Praxiteles, the 
sole authenticated masterpiece from the great 
period of Greek art, is impressed with the blend- 
ing of the divine and human that the sculptor 
has here accomplished. We feel that a being 
might have lived who united, as do the classical 
lineaments of this face, the frailties of a man 
with the mastery of a god. Such artistic crea- 
tions are now impossible for the reason that the 
psychological prerequisites to such a masterpiece 
are gone forever. We no longer believe in gods 
who take human shape and mingle among men, 
as Homer and A‘schylus believed. The sculp- 
tured face of the god with its subtle blending of 
divine and human is an artistic reproduction in 
marble of popular beliefs. It stood for a psycho- 
logical reality. 


158 JESUS OR CHRIST 


The realism of the picture the Johannine imag- 
ination draws of the incarnated Logos is a reflec- 
tion of the mental attitude of the age in which 
he wrote. He was surrounded by men and women 
who believed in incarnations of deities, who wor- 
shiped abstractions tabernacling in fleshly shapes. 
The imagination of the Johannine writer was not, 
therefore, consciously playing with fictions. Be- 
cause that background is lacking for us the story 
of John, in spite of its unapproachable beauty, 
will always appear more or less remote and un- 
real. The orthodox apologist tries to preserve 
this background by means of the dogma of super- 
natural inspiration. The whole thing is a miracle. 
John and his readers did not need this orthodox 
theological prop. The writer of the fourth gospel 
would hardly have understood what is meant by 
the modern dogma of inspiration. It would have 
seemed to him superfluous and absurd. For the 
book was for its author and for his readers but 
the reflection of religious realities. And living 
religious realities do not need apologetics. 

Even more important than the social back- 
ground for the understanding of John’s realism 
was his mysticism. The fourth gospel is perhaps 
the most classical expression of religious mysti- 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 159 


cism we possess. John, like all great mystics, 
shows a tendency to blur the objective reality fa- 
miliar to common sense. The vivid and absorb- 
ing inner mystical experiences tend to distort 
or color all other phases of experience. Thus do 
the fictions of the mystical imagination become 
fused or confused with objective data of history. 
The mental pictures derived by John from oral 
tradition as to the life of Jesus or even pictures 
that were the pure creations of his mystical imagi- 
nation surged up in his mind on the top of waves 
of mystical feeling and became themselves fused 
with these feelings and partook of their inner 
mystical reality. It is thus possible for John 
to describe with perfect ingenuousness and start- 
ling realism scenes from the life of Jesus that 
never took place at all. The story is only a pic- 
tured dream in which the loved presence of Jesus 
is made to speak words, perform acts, miraculous 
or otherwise, that are in harmony with the spirit 
of the dream or play of the mystical imagination. 

The histories of the mystics abound in instances 
of this sort. An ignorant German nun, Anne 
Catherine Emmerich (died 1824), developed the 
power of describing, during her mystical expert- 
ences, incidents in the lives of Jesus or the Virgin 


160 JESUS OR CHRIST 


Mary in such a realistic fashion that they sounded 
like the accounts of an eyewitness. Describing 
the trial of Jesus she said: ‘‘The night had been 
extremely cold and the morning was dark and 
cloudy. A little hail had fallen, which surprised 
every one, but towards twelve o’clock the day 
became brighter ...and when Jesus after the 
scourging fell at the foot of the pillar, I saw 
Claudia Proclus send to the Mother of God a 
bundle of linen,’’ etc.2 Did we not have means of 
checking this story it might be mistaken for fact. 
It is only a fiction of the pious imagination built 
up out of material gathered here and there and 
yet tinged by the vivid inner mystical experiences 
with a note of convincing reality. 

The famous farewell address of John, 14-17, 
perhaps the best liked passage in the New Testa- 
ment, ig a masterpiece of imaginative description 
of how, according to John, the loved wonder- 
working Son of God would have talked to his in- 
timate followers just on the eve of his separation 
from them to take his place in his Father’s house 
of many mansions. There is no better illustra- 
tion in religious literature of how the crude facts 
of life must be universalized, spiritualized, and 


8 Quoted by Underhill, op. cit., p. 238. 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 161 


freed from the shackles of time and space through 
the symbolizing power of a great religious imagi- 
nation before they can most effectively appeal to 
men. 

Perhaps the most realistic touch in the entire 
gospel is in the story of the resurrection of Laza- 
rus where it is said that Jesus wept, apparently 
from human sympathy for bereaved friends. We 
have our choice of explaining this realistic touch 
on the basis of the historicity of the story or as 
a fiction of the mystical imagination. One who 
asserts that we have here an event of history and 
not a realistic fiction of the imagination is faced 
at once with the difficulty that this miracle, the 
most spectacular in the life of Jesus, is not men- 
tioned by the other synoptic evangelists. It is 
improbable either that this miracle would have 
escaped them or that knowing of it they would 
not have mentioned it. The most obvious ex- 
planation is that it never happened. The ques- 
tion remains then, Why should John have intro- 
duced such a story into his narrative? The rea- 
son is suggested in Jesus’ reply to Martha’s 
lament that, had Jesus been present, her brother 
would not have died: ‘‘I am the resurrection 
and the life; he that believeth in me, though he 


162 JESUS OR CHRIST 


die yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and 
believeth in me shall never die’? (John 11:25). 
This anchors the whole story to the central theme 
of the gospel announced by the writer in chapter 
20, verse 31, ‘‘These things are written that ye 
might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son 
of God.’’ The book is a spiritual portrait, not 
history, and this incident is introduced for artistic 
effect. 

Suppose that a great artist were seeking to por- 
tray as difficult a theme as this, ‘‘He that be- 
lieveth in me, though he die yet shall he live: 
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall 
never die,’’ what symbols must he select to con- 
vey this subtle religious value? ‘‘What better 
symbol could he select than the calling of his 
friend Lazarus from the grave? And shall he ex- 
press it vaguely and obscurely because he does 
not believe that it happened, but merely wishes to 
arouse an idea in the breast of the observer? We 
would call him stupid indeed did he not paint in 
striking fashion Jesus standing before the grave, 
amid the strained expectation of the crowd, with 
uplifted arm crying out, ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ 
while behind the half-open door of the tomb shows 
the figure of the dead wrapped in a shroud. And 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 163 


shall we blame the author of the fourth gospel 
when he uses his art, the art of painting with 
words instead of a brush, in equally vivid and 
effective fashion? Shall we blame him because 
we do not believe that what he paints really hap- 
pened when perhaps he does not even believe it 
himself?’ ® 

To introduce into such a picture tears of mere 
human sympathy spoils the artistic effect. It 
would be more natural for Jesus to rejoice, for he 
knew that the next moment by the use of his divine 
power he would turn her tears of sorrow into 
those of joy. The divine Son of God ‘‘was moved 
with indignation within himself’? and wept be- 
cause of the lack of faith both of Mary and 
Martha and of the Jews. The singular indiffer- 
ence of Jesus when he tarried two days upon 
receiving the news of Lazarus’s sickness does 
not fit into the scheme of human psychology as 
we know it. It does fit the Johannine picture of 
the divine wonder-working Son of God who says, 
‘‘T am glad for your sakes that I was not there 
to the intent that ye may believe.’’ Every touch 
of the artist’s pen is made to heighten the subtle 
supernaturalism of this incident. Hence the de- 


9 Schmiedel, Das vierte Evangelium, pp. 77 ff. 


164 JESUS OR CHRIST 


lay and indifference to the sufferings of the be- 
reaved; hence the dramatic protest of the loving 
sister, ‘‘Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he 
hath been dead four days’’; hence the prayer at 
the grave-side uttered not to get power to work 
the miracle but ‘‘because of the multitude which 
standeth around’’; hence the spectacular, almost 
thaumaturgic touch, ‘‘He cried with a loud voice, 
Lazarus come forth’’; hence the quiet God-like 
self-snfficiency of the final command ‘‘ Loose him 
and let him go.’’ This is the picture of a god, 
not of a man, drawn by a mystic and a poet. 

What then shall we say of the enigma of Jesus? 
Are there any inferences which we may draw 
from this superficial sketch of the central prob- 
lem of the Christian imagination, the problem of 
Jesus or Christ? In the first place, the facts 
amply show that the distinction between the Jesus 
of history and the Christ of faith is a legitimate 
one and corresponds to reality. It gives rise toa 
very real question, one that will be discussed in 
the next chapter, What is Christianity? Are we 
to find its essence in the Jesus of historical fact 
or in the Christ of the fictions of the religious 
imagination? 

In the second place, the facts also justify the 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 165 


conclusion that what we may confidently assert 
of the historical Jesus of space and time does 
not hold for the celestial being, the ‘‘Lord of 
Glory’’ of the Christian imagination. There may 
be and doubtless is a close connection between the 
Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It is 
doubtful, however, whether the historian will ever 
be able to determine accurately just what that 
connection is. The data left to us are too 
meager, the factors entering into the problem 
are so many and so obscure that we are thrown 
back for the most part upon the surmises of the 
scholars. | 

In the third place, it is important to distinguish 
the immediate factual basis of the lofty ideali- 
zations of the Christian imagination, centered 
in the preéxistent and immortal Christ, from 
the remoter facts as to the historical Jesus. Be- 
tween the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith 
lie the vivid religious experiences of his followers 
aroused by his death and the empty grave. How 
vivid those experiences were may be inferred 
from the Pentecost story of the jets of flame, the 
speaking with tongues and the prophesyings. In 
Paul especially we can see that the immediate 
background of his picture of the Christ was not 


166 JESUS OR CHRIST 


the Jesus of history, but his religious experi- 
ences and those of the gentile group with which 
he was associated. 

In the fourth place, it is well to remember that 
neither the historical reality of the man Jesus 
nor the psychological reality of the vivid reli- 
gious experiences aroused by his career guar- 
antee the absolute and final validity of the pre- 
cious fictions created by the religious imagina- 
tion as symbols of these experiences. The con- 
cepts of God the Father, Christ the Redeemer, 
the blood atonement, original sin, or the final 
judgment, are after all only symbols and must 
inevitably be altered or give place to other sym- 
bols that better express the religious aspirations 
of another age. 

As one watches the kaleidoscopic changes that 
are ever under way in the pluralistic welter of 
reality, difference treads constantly upon the 
heels of identity in religion as in everything 
else. Perhaps it is just as well that it is so, for, 
‘‘Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable 
stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not 
unfortunately, the universe is wild—game fla- 
vored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all. 
She knows no laws; the same returns not, save 


“THE WORD BECAME FLESH” 167 


to bring the different. The slow round of the 
engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, 
but the difference is distributed back over the 
whole curve, never an instant true—ever not 
EWTETE Sey 


10 William James, “A Pluralistic Mystic.” Hibbert Journal, 
VIII, 758. 


Chapter IV 


WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
Quid est, quod amo, quum te amo?—Augustine 
1. THE PROBLEM. 


HE conclusions of the last chapter show the 

large part played by fictions of the re- 
ligious imagination in the origin of Christianity. 
They indicate that the controversy which the 
Fundamentalists would wage with modern cul- 
ture is only part of a larger question which con- 
cerns, not only evolution and the Bible, but the 
very essence of Christianity itself. What is the 
real basis of Christianity, the Jesus of history 
or the Christ of faith? Are the facts actually 
known about Jesus so few, disconnected, and 
overlaid by the fictions of his followers as to be 
practically negligible? The central problem of 
Christian apologetics is now no longer miracle, 
inspiration, the virgin birth, or the resurrection. 
It is: What is Christianity? Is it a fact or is it 


a fiction or is it a blend of both? If it is a blend 
168 


THE PROBLEM 169 


of both, how are they related and what is their 
relative importance? 

There are, generally hae four answers 
to the question. 

The radicals, basing their conclusions partly 
upon the negative results of biblical criticism and 
partly upon the data of comparative religion, 
deny outright the historical Jesus and assert that 
Christianity originated in a Christ-myth similar 
to contemporary pagan myths of savior deities. 

At the opposite extreme from the radicals stand 
the orthodox Protestant and Catholic groups, who 
do not distinguish sharply between the Jesus of 
history and the Christ of faith, but claim for both, 
thanks to the supernaturalism that sanctions 
them, equal historical validity. 

Between these two extremes lie two other 
eroups, the Protestant Liberals and the Catholic 
Modernists. They agree in their desire to medi- 
ate between Christianity and modern culture. 
They accept the conclusions of science and claim 
that they support rather than discredit the claims 
of Christianity upon modern man. They differ, 
however, in their points of approach. The Prot- 
estant Liberals, led by such scholars as Harnack 
and Bousset of Germany, insist that the histori- 


170 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


cal facts as to the life and teachings of Jesus 
should be made the basis of Christianity. The 
later encrustations of doctrine and worship and 
ecclesiastical organization have obscured the 
original historical truth of the gospel. Their cry 
is ‘‘Back to Jesus,’’ with his gospel of the king- 
dom, the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood 
of man, the law of love, and emphasis on the 
supreme value of the human soul. 

The Catholic Modernist objects that this cry 
for a return to the gospel of Jesus as opposed 
to the countless gospels about Jesus, discounts 
the facts of history, ignores the value of a Chris- 
tian experience continuous from age to age, and 
requires a break with tradition and a religious 
detachment possible for a scholar like Harnack, 
but unthinkable for the average conventional 
Christian. The religious symbols of one age can 
never be effectively utilized by another different 
age without being modified. The Modernists, 
therefore, falling back upon the idea of develop- 
ment, so attractively presented by Cardinal New- 
man, the spiritual father of the Modernists, assert 
that true Christianity is a living and growing or- 
ganism whose vitality is evinced in the effective 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 171 


way in which it adapts itself to the needs of 
succeeding ages. While the Liberal stresses facts, 
the Modernist is inclined to pin his faith to values. 
The Liberal minimizes the role of imagination in 
early Christianity and clings to the findings of 
the historian. The Modernist magnifies the role 
of the imagination, subordinating the facts to it. 


2. THE FUNDAMENTALIST AND HIS MENTAL 
STEREOTYPES. 


The most interesting and at the same time the 
most tragic phase of Fundamentalism is its singu- 
lar helplessness in the face of modern culture. 
Tt is terrified and scandalized at the inroads of 
modern culture upon traditional beliefs, and yet 
it has no solution to offer. This inadequacy of 
Fundamentalism is to be traced to a basic weak- 
ness, namely, its inability to draw any intelligent 
distinction between fact and fiction in religion. 
The demand today is for clear thinking in re- 
lhgion, but what the Fundamentalist wants is 
‘‘safe’”’? thinking. But ‘‘clear’’ thinking and 
‘‘safe’’ thinking are not necessarily identical. 
The vision of the Fundamentalist is blurred, be- 


172 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


cause between him and reality there intervenes 
a mass of precious mental stereotypes, legacies 
from the past. 

Plato, in his immortal allegory of the cave, de- 
scribes its inmates as chained so that ‘‘they see 
only their own shadows or the shadows of one 
another which the fire throws upon the opposite 
wall of the cave.’’ This illustrates one of the 
most universal and yet least realized phases of 
life. We all live in an unreal and often false 
mental environment composed of the fixed tradi- 
tional conceptions we have of men and things. 
We inherit stereotyped symbols, traditional men- 
tal pictures by means of which we orient our- 
selves not only in our relations to each other but 
also with regard to God and devils, heaven and 
hell. The Fundamentalist reacts to his mental 
picture of evolution, not to the facts. Our creeds 
are composed of ‘‘sectarian artifacts’’?* which 
we have never subjected to critical examination. 
We are usually completely ignorant of their ori- 
ein and history. We inherit them just as we do 
our language or social institutions. These mental 
stereotypes, especially when weighted with the in- 
ertia of mass opinion, so powerful in a democ- 


1 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 21. 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 173 


racy, or when made sacrosanct by religion, exer- 
cise a tyrannical rule over the minds of men that 
few are able to throw off. The chief weakness of 
the Fundamentalist imagination is that it is 
highly stereotyped. For nowhere do our mental 
stereotypes escape beneficent criticism so easily 
as in traditional religion. 

The most striking stereotype of the Fundamen- 
talist imagination is supernaturalism. This stere- 
otype has an ancient and honorable lineage. It 
is derived directly from the Scriptures. In the 
naive supernaturalism of the Bible fact and fic- 
tion are uncritically blended and we have no evi- 
dence that even Jesus himself felt there was any 
problem. Miracle in the modern sense, the cor- 
relative of which is the scientific conception of 
law, did not exist for Jesus and his contempo- 
raries. It was as natural to associate marvelous 
deeds with great religious leaders as it is for us 
to associate evolution with biology. When the 
Fundamentalist, however, makes this stereotype 
of supernaturalism basic for his religion, he 
closes the door to any rapprochement between 
religion and science. A miracle may be believed; 
it can never have scientific proof. By very defini- 
tion it belongs to a realm in which scientific proof 


174 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


is not possible. All attempts to prove it end in 
logical contradictions and absurdities. When we 
say that the historicity of the resurrection of 
Lazarus is evinced by the fact that it is part of 
a miraculously inspired record, we are proving 
miracle by miracle, which is arguing in a circle. 
The Fundamentalist is guilty of an inexcusable 
inconsistency when, after asserting that he be- 
lieves in miracle, which of course he has a perfect 
right to do, he then seeks to defend it by argu- 
ments and proofs that can never be applied to 
miracle. To be perfectly consistent he should be 
content with simple belief and let scientific or 
historical proof alone. There is but one legiti- 
mate use for miracle and that is as a symbol of 
the religious imagination. Miracle has interest 
for us only as symbolizing the way in which men 
of long ago represented divine activity. Their 
symbols no longer suit the modern type of imagi- 
nation but were perfectly natural and legitimate 
to them. 

The stereotype of supernaturalism is directly 
responsible for the failure to distinguish fact from 
fiction in the Gospel narratives. Consequently, 
the Fundamentalist’s picture of Jesus is a blur 
of contradictions and absurdities. The Funda- 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 175 


mentalist insists that the Liberal does not stand 
in any religious relation to Jesus because he does 
not worship him as God. ‘‘Jesus for him is an 
example for faith, not the object of faith.’?? The 
Fundamentalist claims to stand in a religious re- 
lation because he worships Jesus as God. The 
Fundamentalist apparently is talking of the 
Christ of the religious imagination, while the Lib- 
eral has in mind the Jesus of history. The Fun- 
damentalist, furthermore, claims that the Liberal 
has no right to say that Jesus should be imitated 
as the first Christian, for Jesus had two charac- 
teristics which make it forever impossible for him 
to be the ideal Christian character, namely, his 
Messianic consciousness and his sinlessness. Men 
are made Christians by what the divine God-man 
Jesus did for them and not by imitating him. To 
imitate him is impossible, for Jesus ‘‘was no more 
a Christian than God is a religious being. God 
is the object of all religion, he is absolutely neces- 
sary to all religion; but he himself is the only 
being in the universe who can never in his own 
nature be religious. So it is with Jesus as related 
to Christian faith.’’ It follows, therefore, that 
‘af we look for a complete illustration of the 


2 Machen, Christiamty and Liberalism, p. 85, 


176 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


Christian life we cannot find it in the religious 
experience of Jesus.’’* Then, as though suddenly 
aware of the Docetic tone of this language, the 
writer adds, ‘‘Jesus certainly led a true human 
life’? and as ‘‘our supreme and perfect example 
is worthy of imitation.’’ + 

Now here is confusion worse confounded. Ap- 
parently we have at least three Jesuses, the hu- 
man Jesus of the Fundamentalist, who may be im- 
itated but not worshiped; the preéxistent divine 
Jesus of the Fundamentalist, who may be wor- 
shiped but not imitated; and finally the Jesus of 
the Liberal, who, according to the Fundamental- 
ist, is a sort of religious and moral monstrosity 
who can be neither worshiped nor imitated. The 
Fundamentalist offers the Liberal the following 
dilemma. If you worship Jesus, you have a re- 
ligion, but you cannot do this since you deny he 
is God. If you imitate him, you get moral inspira- 
tion which, of course, is not religion. But since 
you must either worship or imitate Jesus, it fol- 
lows that he can have no religious value for you 
whatsoever. It is to such absurd quibblings that 
the Fundamentalist scholar is reduced because his 


3 Machen, op. cit., p. 91. 
4Ibid., p. 93. 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 177 


hard and fast supernaturalism prevents his dis- 
tinguishing intelligently between the Jesus of his- 
tory and the Christ of the religious imagination. 
There is but one satisfactory way out of this the- 
ological and metaphysical muddle and that is to 
recognize that the God-man Jesus Christ was a 
symbol of the early Christian imagination and 
should be interpreted as such, never as prosaic 
historical fact. 

The F'undamentalist’s mental stereotype of the 
supernatural is mainly responsible for his vain 
attempt to base religious realities on a book. 
‘‘Christianity is based on an account of something 
that happened in the first century of our era.’’® 
That is to say, the validity of the Christian reli- 
gion stands or falls with the truth or falsity of 
a record of certain alleged historical events. 
‘‘Christian experience depends absolutely on an 
event.’’® ‘‘Christian experience is rightly used 
when it confirms the documentary evidence. But 
it can never possibly provide a substitute for the 
documentary evidence.’’ Not what men felt or 
still feel Jesus to mean to them, but what the 
biblical record states about him is the basis of 


5 Machen, op. cit., p. 54. 
6 Ibid., p. 71. 


178 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


religion. ‘‘A creed is not a mere expression of 
Christian experience, but on the contrary it is a 
setting forth of those facts upon which experi- 
ence 1s based.’’” ‘‘The narration of the facts is 
history; the narration of the facts with the mean- 
ing of the facts is doctrine.’’ ® 

This curious theological hysteron proteron 
which exactly inverts the order of religious ex- 
perience is directly traceable to an almost super- 
stitious regard for a supernaturally inspired and 
hence infallible book. Misguided religious loy- 
alty has turned the Bible into a fetish, with the 
result that men transfer the seat of religious 
realities from experience, where it belongs, to the 
dusty page of a printed document. Religion is 
life, not a book which is only an outgrowth of 
life. 

The Fundamentalist apparently learns little 
from history. He offers us an ‘‘either-or’’— 
either the ‘‘facts’’ of the New Testament record 
are true or Christianity is bankrupt. This is 
dangerous in the light of the past. In 1615 Pope 
Paul V and the Inquisition told Galileo that either 
his sun-centered astronomy was false or else the 


7 [bid., p. 19. 
8 Ibid., p. 29. 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 179 


whole Christian faith was shipwrecked, and 
placed on the Index every book that taught the 
motion of the earth. In 1724 John Hutchinson, a 
professor at Cambridge, claimed that belief in 
the Newtonian theory meant ‘‘infidelity.’’ Calvin 
said the choice lay between Galileo and the Bible 
and asked ‘‘Who will venture to place the au- 
thority of Copernicus above that of the Holy 
Spirit??? The theologians who explained earth- 
quakes, thorns and thistles, and the carnage 
among animals as due to the curse visited upon 
the earth because of Adam’s sin branded: the 
geologists and biologists, who explained these 
things in terms of natural forces, as ‘‘impugners 
of the sacred record,’’ ‘‘infidel’’ assailants of 
‘‘the truth of God.’’ Geology was called ‘‘a dark 
art,’’ ‘‘not a subject of lawful enquiry,’’ ‘‘an 
awful evasion of the testimony of revelation.”’ 
Geology is now quite a reputable science while 
religion seems to survive. 

The church long laid it down as an indisput- 
able fact that storms were due to ‘‘the prince of 
the power of the air.’? This was thought to be 
corroborated by the diabolical behavior of thun- 
derbolts, and elaborate formule of exorcism, in- 
cluding the ringing of consecrated bells, were 


180 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


used until Franklin, with his lightning-rod, for- 
ever laid the demons of the air without any visi- 
ble evil effects upon religion. John Wesley said, 
‘“‘The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giv- 
ing up of the Bible,’’ a remarkable parallel to 
the contention of William Jennings Bryan that to 
accept evolution is to give up the Bible. Witch- 
craft and special creation are now both discred- 
ited and yet the Bible is still held in high repute. 

In 1875 a geologist, Professor Alexander Win- 
chell of Vanderbilt University, taught that men 
lived before Adam and that the human race was 
not descended from Adam. The religious body 
in control of the University removed him from 
his position with the declaration: ‘‘This is an 
age in which scientific atheism, having divested 
itself of the habiliments that most adorn and dig- 
nify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denu- 
dation. ... We will have no more of this.’ 
Hardly a year passes that we do not add to our 
knowledge of these pre-Adamitic races of men. 
Meanwhile Vanderbilt University has passed 
from under theological control and teaches these 
facts of anthropology to the young with no visible 
injury to religion. The whole history of science 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 181 


is a story of one long retreat on the part of or- 
thodox religion from its traditional conceptions 
of the factual bases of faith. Yet religion sur- 
vives. Well may the scientist say to his Funda- 
mentalist friend enamored of ‘‘facts’’ with su- 
pernatural sanctions that only ‘‘an evil and 
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.”’ 

It may be maintained, however, that this terri- 
ble dilemma of ‘‘either-or,’’ which has proven 
so singularly impotent to dam the ever-widening 
stream of scientific knowledge, still holds for the 
origin of the Christian religion. In the light of 
the constant failure of theology’s attempt to base 
religion upon alleged fact solely or mainly it 
would seem wise not to force upon Christianity 
the alternatives of establishing the historicity of 
certain events or of being discredited. Let us 
make this as concrete as possible. Suppose we 
ask a jury of the most capable and unprejudiced 
historians, men of unquestioned scholarship and 
intellectual honesty, to decide as to the relative 
historical trustworthiness of the accounts of the 
resurrection of Jesus and the assassination of 
Julius Cesar. Does any one suppose for a mo- 
ment that they would be able to reach the same 


182 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


unanimity of opinion with regard to the resurrec- 
tion that they would reach as to the way in which 
Cesar met his death? 

Furthermore, if we find upon reading a history 
of New Testament criticism, such as Schweitzer’s 
Quest of the Historical Jesus, that as scholars 
have mastered more thoroughly what is to be 
known of the life of Jesus their doubts as to the 
historicity of the virgin birth or physical resur- 
rection have increased, ought we not to hesitate 
as to the wisdom of making the historicity of 
these events a condition prerequisite to the Chris- 
tian life? Says Loisy, ‘‘The inhabitants of the 
earth, down to the present moment, experienced 
grace in a manifold variety of forms. Their 
slow progress seems to evolve in a field much 
wider than that which the theology of the past 
centuries would assign. The notion of salvation 
itself is not immutable; why then should its con- 
ditions be immutable? Shall we make the pos- 
sibility for moral restoration for each man, and 
that of a progressive education of humanity in 
its different branches, depend on ideas and facts 
of which the reality cannot be incontestably es-_ 
tablished? Hither I am much deceived, or we 
are committing a violent anachronism and are 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 183 


strangely misunderstanding the prevalent temper 
of our time when we suppose that our intellec- 
tual attitude towards certain points of belief— 
for example, towards the resurrection of Jesus 
—either could or ought to have been that of the 
first Christian generations.’’ ® 

All would agree that Christianity is ‘‘based 
upon an account of something that happened in 
the first century of our era,’’ as the Fundamen- 
talist contends.’° But all turns upon what sort 
of facts are here presupposed. It is certainly a 
fact that the early disciples believed that Jesus 
rose in the flesh and ascended into heaven and on 
the basis of that belief started a great movement. 
But the fact of Paul’s religious experiences and 
the fact of the physical resurrection are two dif- 
ferent things. It is hardly convincing to say that 
to deny the factual reality of the resurrection 
is to base Paul’s experiences upon an illusion 
and, therefore, to strip them of all religious value. 
Because the gods of Olympus or of ancient Egypt 
were, from our point of view, illusions, it does 
not follow that the symbolic role they played in 
the lives of men of old had no religious value. 


9 Hibbert Journal, VIII, 489. 
10 Machen, op. cit., p. 54. 


184 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


Similarly the twelve patriarchs who gave their 
names to the tribes of Israel are now held to 
have been legendary characters, but 1t does not 
follow that the value they had for the religious 
imagination of the ancient Hebrews was thereby 
destroyed. If it is recognized that the interest 
of the religious imagination lies and has always 
lain in the realm of symbols and that a symbol 
does not necessarily depend either upon its logi- 
cal coherence or its scientific truthfulness, many 
of the difficulties of a factually minded Chris- 
tian faith will disappear. Symbols of the re- 
ligious imagination spring immediately from the 
social milicu and strike their roots into levels of 
experience that lie deeper than thought. They 
will vary with the group or the age. 

The Fundamentalist then faces an wmpasse, the 
far-reaching implication of which he does not 
realize. He has inherited a naive supernatural- 
ism perfectly natural to the authors of the Bible, 
but singularly out of place in the modern world. 
This naive supernaturalism was peculiar to an 
age that had no idea of the complexities of the 
problem of religious experience. It was ignorant 
of the psychological factors involved. In the heat 
of religious enthusiasms men slipped easily and 


THE FUNDAMENTALIST 185 


unconsciously from the realm of fact over into 
that of fictions of the religious imagination. 
They made use of religious symbols, not only as 
convenient means for representing inner religious 
experience, but likewise as instruments through 
which to get knowledge of men, nature, and God. 
An exact scientific knowledge of nature and of 
the workings of the human mind, which might 
have checked this uncritical use of symbols of 
the religious imagination, was lacking. The 
naive, uncritical religious realism of the Bible is 
justifiable because inseparable from the age. It 
is not justifiable in the man who lives in the midst 
of our modern culture. By clinging to it the 
Fundamentalist is forced to live in two worlds, 
between which lie centuries of intensive political, 
economic, and intellectual development. When 
he prays to his God, he uses the language and 
presupposes the world-view of men who lived two 
thousand years ago. When he educates his child, 
combats disease, or develops his business, he 
appeals whole-heartedly to the latest and best 
achievements of the modern world. Such a 
vicious separation between the world of religious 
faith and that of contemporary life is impossible. 
It creates an 2mpasse in the religious life that is 


186 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


intolerable. By divorcing religion from modern 
culture, the Fundamentalist has made it impos- 
sible to draw any intelligible distinction between 
fact and fiction in the religious life. In so doing 
he has endangered the integrity of religion itself. 


3. LIBERALISM. 


Liberalism, as opposed to Fundamentalism, is 
inclined to overestimate historical fact and un- 
derestimate the role of the religious imagination. 
This is due to the forces that gave rise to Lib- 
eralism. It is an attempt to mediate between 
Christianity and the spirit of modern culture. 
In modern culture science is the determining 
factor, especially at the level of intellectual in- 
terests. Science has inherited the authoritative 
role once exercised by theology. Liberalism, 
therefore, seeks a reformulation of Christian be- 
lief in which the demands of science are not only 
incorporated, but are the point of departure for 
an interpretation of Christianity that will suit 
the needs of a factually minded world. This will 
be made clearer perhaps by a brief statement of 
the problem of religion and modern culture. 

It has been suggested in a previous chapter 


LIBERALISM 187 


that religion is primarily an emotional reaction 
called out by contact, real or imaginary, with the 
ultimate forces of life. This reaction finds ex- 
pression in ritual and symbol. When symbols 
have been rationalized we get creeds, doctrine, 
and religious philosophy. Along with this goes 
also a social technique consisting of forms of 
worship, church organization, and educational or 
missionary institutions, all of which look to the 
preservation and propagation of this emotional 
attitude. The fairly constant factor in all this is 
the emotional or evaluating attitude because it 
is rooted in human nature. It is obvious, how- 
ever, that religious symbols and social technique 
must change from age to age, owing to the pres- 
sure brought to bear upon them by altered ways 
of life. Where there is a pronounced ‘‘cultural 
lag’? between the old traditional forms, through 
which the religious need found satisfaction, and 
changes in ways of life, the religious problem 
emerges and there is a demand for a reformula- 
tion of religious beliefs. 

Owing to the rapid and world-wide spread of 
industrial civilization, with its science and the 
machine process, there has arisen a need for 
changes in creed and social technique to bring re- 


188 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


ligion into adjustment. This need is world-wide 
because all educated men of all nations think in 
terms of a common science and tend to see the 
world in the same way. Men may speak different 
languages, but they all ride in trains, use auto- 
mobiles, telephones, and telegraphs, and are all 
familiar with similar commercial and manufactur- 
ing processes. The masses are in the grip of a 
scientific civilization which has little sympathy 
for, often downright hostility to, traditional re- 
ligious beliefs and customs. 

It is usual for the traditionalist to assert that 
only the few, namely, the intelligentsia, are in- 
fected with the virus of the modern scientific 
point of view. If this were true, the disturbing 
factors in religion might well be ignored. Ideas, 
no matter how brilliant, when restricted to the 
intellectual few seldom start a revolution. Pro- 
found disturbances in religious belief almost in- 
variably presuppose radical alterations in the 
stresses and strains of social life. What the tra- 
ditionalist fails to see is that modern culture, 
associated with democracy and science, and 
slowly forcing adjustments in religion, is part 
of the very texture of our life. The fundamental- 
ist, therefore, in challenging the implications of 


LIBERALISM 189 


science and democracy, is really challenging the 
structure of modern culture. This makes his 
objurgations fatuous to one who grasps the 
problem. 

In answer to this imperative and world-wide 
eall for religious readjustment, two movements 
have arisen, one within the Protestant fold known 
as Liberalism, and one within the Catholic fold, 
called Modernism. Both alike are loyal to sci- 
ence and religion and insist upon the establish- 
ment of some friendly modus vivendi between 
them. Liberalism is Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic, 
Modernism is Latin. Modernism seeks freedom 
for the expression of the great religious con- 
sciousness of the church in harmony with the im- 
plications of modern culture. Liberalism seeks 
freedom for the individual to find God in the way 
best suited to his age and his temperamental 
needs. The freedom of Modernism is not icono- 
clastic, but merely insists upon the proper subor- 
dination of the external technique of institution- 
alized religion to the will of the inner life-giving 
spirit of the body of believers. The freedom of 
Liberalism is more than apt to be iconoclastic 
and tends to weaken ecclesiastical forms and au- 
thority. Modernism and Liberalism may be de- 


190 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


scribed, then, as the forms which religion tends 
to take in the mind of the man of Catholic and 
the man of Protestant persuasion imbued with 
modern culture. 

Liberalism is German in origin, or at least it is 
through the patient toil of German scholars that 
it has found its ablest presentation. Its classical 
statement is found in the fifteen lectures delivered 
by Professor Adolf Harnack to the students of 
Berlin during the winter semester of 1899-1900, 
and published under the title ‘“What Is Chris- 
tianity?’’ Two things have shaped the rise of 
Liberalism in Germany, namely, the rigorous ap- 
plication of scientific historical criticism to the 
sacred records and the subtle influence of German 
temperament and religious traditions. Harnack, 
faced with the alternatives of the Jesus of his- 
tory or the Christ of faith, like the true histo- 
rian loyal to science, chose the historical Jesus. 
In the gospel actually preached by Jesus is to be 
found the essence of Christianity. 

But the teachings of Jesus are not so easy to 
define. If he taught the Fatherhood of God, he 
also taught with no less emphasis the speedy end 
of the world and a palingenesis in which the first 
should be last and the last first. There are, how- 


LIBERALISM 191. 


ever, certain phases of Jesus’ gospel, such as his 
ethical inwardness and especially the emphasis 
upon lova and the intimate mystical oneness with 
God the Father, that have much in common with 
the spirit of German Protestantism. Luther and 
Calvin accepted the same system of theology, but 
stressed different phases of it. Calvin, with his 
legal training, his logical French mind and his 
genius for organization, gave to Reformed Prot- 
estantism a practical, militant and world-conquer- 
ing character where the emphasis was laid upon 
action. Luther’s deeply mystical temperament 
led him to stress purity of soul and the inner 
peace born of the redeeming act of God’s love. 
This individualistic and mystical note was elab- 
orated by such thinkers as Schleiermacher and 
Ritschl. Thanks, therefore, to exact historical 
method and the traditional mystical and indi- 
vidualistic piety of German Protestantism, we 
find Harnack restricting the essence of Christi- 
anity to the gospel of the Kingdom, the F'ather- 
hood of God, and the law of love. Here, then, 
we are to seek the essence of Christianity. 

The world owes the great Liberal scholars a 
debt it can never pay. They have taken a long 
step towards that adjustment of religion to mod- 


192 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


ern culture so desperately needed. ‘The pious 
ignoramuses who imagine that they are glorify- 
ing God by heaping abuse upon the heads of these 
scholars will be forgotten when the names of 
these scholars are remembered and _ honored. 
Good things, however, have the defects of their 
qualities. Out of the very excellencies of Liber- 
alism come some of its weaknesses. Liberalism 
is characterized by its harmony with science and 
its insistence upon individual freedom. It is more 
than mere tolerance. It is a mental attitude, an 
intellectual way of life that is curious and experi- 
mental. The Liberal must to a certain extent be 
detached and impersonal in his views of men and 
things. To be a partisan is hardly compatible 
with Liberalism. Liberalism seeks to avoid the 
disturbing effect of unreasoned loyalties. Lib- 
eralism, in other words, is not a fighting faith. 
Here is a most serious handicap in a society 
which demands, especially in religion, that we 
take sides. 

The mental atmosphere encouraged by the war 
fanned Fundamentalism into a flame which is now 
a conflagration, but it proved deadly poison to 
Liberalism. The war called for a state of mind 
that wanted action, that demanded results. The 


LIBERALISM 193 


critical mind, tolerance and the willingness to 
weigh all sides of a question were at a discount. 
‘<The true Liberal is one who, when he repudiates 
an idea, does so as one who knows what it is to 
believe it. And when he accepts an idea, he 
knows what it is to reject it.’’ Obviously during 
the war and post-war periods it was impossible 
to cultivate any such mental attitude, and the 
men who insisted upon doing so were looked upon 
as either nuisances or possible traitors. Liberal- 
ism, in religion as elsewhere, has been fighting 
a retreating battle in this country since the war. 
It is this as much as anything else that has en- 
couraged the militant intolerance of Fundamen- 
talism. 

Traditional Christianity has always been in- 
tolerant. It inherited this intolerance from Juda- 
ism, and because of its intolerance of other faiths 
was persecuted by the Roman Empire as a religio 
illicita. This intolerance was continued after 
Christianity got the upper hand, throughout the 
Middle Ages and since the Reformation. The 
intolerance of Fundamentalism towards Liberal- 
ism, though an anachronism in our modern world, 
is true to Christian tradition. Liberalism is in 
truth a radical break with historical Christianity. 


194 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


Liberalism is handicapped by being forced to 
‘‘bore from within.’’ It must preserve at least 
an external agreement with the forms of orthodox 
Christianity if it is to accomplish its ends. This 
has necessitated the adoption of methods which 
to the conservative appear dishonest. He accuses 
the Liberal of surreptitiously pouring new wine 
into old bottles without changing the labels. The 
traditional doctrine of the Trinity is toned down 
into something very like Unitarianism. Miracle, 
the Liberal says, is merely the way men of old 
time described the creative power of God mani- 
fested through his chosen servants. The virgin 
birth and the resurrection are ways.in which 
primitive Christianity expressed its appreciation 
of the supreme moral and spiritual importance 
of Jesus’ life and work and its belief in the un- 
broken continuity of his influence. Inspiration, 
he declares, is merely the dogmatic formulation 
of the fact that the sacred Scriptures are a peren- 
nial source of religious stimulus and moral power. 

The Liberal claims that he has retained the 
essence of Christianity and has discarded only 
the accidental forms through which it first found 
expression. The conservative claims that the 
Liberal has betrayed the faith of the church and 


LIBERALISM 195 


in all honesty should withdraw and set up a creed 
of his own. The Liberal, on the other hand, is 
aware that he needs the institution of the church 
to do his work and that if he tries to draw up a 
creed he will be merely setting up another type 
of Fundamentalism. The Fundamentalist glee- 
fully recognizes the preflicament of the Liberal 
and clamors for a ‘‘show-down.’’ He scornfully 
accuses the Liberal of fighting under ‘‘conditions 
of low visibility.’’** His is a cowardly faith ‘‘that 
rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, 
regardless of their meanings.’’ The Fundamen- 
talist is a clever fighter. He knows that in any 
such ‘‘show down”’ the advantages will be all on 
his side. He knows not only what he believes, 
but also what God wants him to believe. The 
Liberals are not quite so sure of their own minds 
or the mind of the deity. ‘‘They seek God if haply 
they might feel after him and find him’”’ in a world 
that has to a very large extent lost the God of 
traditional theology. 

To all this criticism the Liberal has an effective 
reply, namely, that history teaches us religion is 
life, not logic. If it were all logic, the position 
of the Fundamentalist would be stronger. But 


11 Machen, op. cit., p. 1. 


196 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


it may seriously be doubted whether any great 
controversy in the church’s history has been set- 
tled strictly in terms of logic. Logic was all on 
the side of Arius at the Council of Nicea, but life 
in the form of well-established religious use and 
wont was on the side of Athanasius and the ma- 
jority, and they won the day. The creed adopted 
at Nicea is full of logical absurdities, but as a set 
of symbols it satisfied because it met the needs of 
the religious life of that age. Every great creed 
adopted by the church is more or less a compro- 
mise between logic and life, with life speaking 
the last word. The Westminster Confession, 
probably the creed that best suits the Funda- — 
mentalist, is no exception to this rule. It is of 
course vastly easier to follow the propositions of 
a syllogism to their conclusion than it is to inter- 
pret life. 

Now it is possible that the tentativeness and 
apparent timidity of the Liberal in the matter of 
a theological ‘‘show-down’’ may be prompted by 
a much more sensitive regard for the religious 
realities than is felt by the Fundamentalist. The 
seeming uncertainty of the Liberal may be due 
to a sincere search for a set of religious symbols 
that will faithfully interpret religious life as we 


LIBERALISM 197 


find it today. Certainly Liberalism is more than 
a mere rebel inclination to escape from the 
shackles of an authoritarian religion. Because of 
his closer touch with reality the Liberal realizes 
better than the Fundamentalist that the religion 
of the masses is a very simple and unreasoned 
affair. It consists of familiar traditional symbols 
that have become embedded in religious life. 
These symbols are not changed by argument. 
They become discredited only indirectly through 
the slow educative process of the prevailing ways 
of life. Here is the real danger to Fundamental- 
ism. And here is where, for the intelligent Lib- 
eral, the real problem lies in religion. It is a 
question of formulating new religious symbols 
better suited to modern culture. 

Just as Liberalism’s emphasis on individual 
freedom exposes it to the Fundamentalist’s criti- 
cism, so even more serious difficulties arise from 
its affiliations with science. The historian seeks 
facts; his method is to explain a thing in terms of 
its setting. Let us suppose the historian is apply- 
ing exact scientific method to the history of 
Jehovah. He may tell us that Jehovah was origi- 
nally the clan god of the Kenites who lived on the 
slopes of Sinai and that Moses became his fol- 


198 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


lower by marrying into the Kenite clan after his 
flight from Egypt. He will tell us how this clan 
god was ennobled and dignified by being made 
party to a great covenant at Sinai, where the 
Hebrew nation was born. He will trace the grad- 
ual socialization and humanization of this crude 
god of the desert by the transition to the agri- 
cultural and urban life of Palestine until he 
reached the purity, the universality, and lofty 
ethical idealism of the God of Isaiah. When 
asked the meaning of this idea of Jehovah in the 
light of these historical facts, he may say that in 
reality Jehovah was the product of the religious 
cravings of the Hebrew people. The analysis of 
these cravings is then turned over to the psychol- 
ogist, who may find that Jehovah is merely one 
of numerous ‘‘defense mechanisms’? by which 
man escapes from the torments of an ‘‘inferiority 
complex.’’ The scientific historian and the sci- 
entific psychologist have thus done their work so 
thoroughly that Jehovah and the religion of the 
ancient Hebrews, the most momentous phases of 
their national existence, have evaporated into sci- 
entifically rarefied thin air. 

Lest it be said that this example is remote and 
not important for the problem of Christianity, 


LIBERALISM 199 


let us take the question of the historic Jesus upon 
the scientifically determined facts of whose life 
and teaching the Liberal bases his faith. Har- 
nack, in the opening lecture of his classical pres- 
entation of Liberalism, says: ‘‘What is Chris- 
tianity? It is solely in its historical sense that we 
shall try to answer this question here; that is to 
say, we shall employ the methods of historical 
science, and the experience of life gained by 
studying the actual course of history.’’?*2 Liber- 
alism is modern, scientific, factually minded. It 
wants to get away from the abstract, the theo- 
logical, the metaphysical, the dogmatic. Like 
‘‘certain Greeks’’ at the feast, the Liberals say, 
‘‘Sir, we would see Jesus,’’ the real Jesus, 
stripped of theology and the false fancies of men. 
Schweitzer in his brilliant work, The Quest of the 
Historical Jesus, has given us the long and fasci- 
nating story of the search of liberal scholarship 
for the real Jesus. What is the result? Only an 
abstraction. One puts down the book with the 
conviction that the ultimate, irreducible, histori- 
cal, and factual Jesus is largely a construct of the 
scholarly imagination. This is borne out by the 
fact that these scholars, whose sincerity and 


12 Harnack, What Is Christianity? p. 7. 


200 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


learning are beyond question, have the greatest 
difficulty in reaching any agreement about this 
historical Jesus. Historical science may give us 
a handful of facts about Jesus, but the essence 
of Christianity escapes it. Its historical Jesus 
is a mere fragment, a construct of the scholar’s 
imagination, not the Christ to whom the Christian 
prays. 

One cannot suppress the feeling that the Lib- 
eral has gone to science, especially historical sci- 
ence, asking for bread and has received a stone. 
Science did its best to answer the Liberal’s ques- 
tion, ‘‘What is Christianity?’’ Why did it fail? 
May it not be because science can never solve the 
problem of religion? While rejecting the futile 
‘‘either-or’’? which the Fundamentalist opposes — 
to modern culture, the Liberal is in danger of 
capitulating to science entirely. Religion cannot 
afford to adopt either the methods or the prob- 
lems of science. Science has no suggestions for 
the solution of religion’s problems. Science may 
aid, but cannot direct the life of religion. That 
life is independent. Says a recent writer: ‘‘It is 
a serious question whether in the long run science 
is going to feel very much more at home with 
Liberalism than it does with Fundamentalism. 


LIBERALISM 201 


Liberals talk easily of the reconciliation of science 
and religion and there are many men of a simple 
and devout faith among the scientists. But the 
main currents of scientific thought reveal no un- 
mistakable movement toward a spiritual inter- 
pretation of the universe.’’ * 

Liberalism, by leaning too heavily upon the 
scientific type of imagination, has impoverished 
the religious imagination. Following the cold, 
white light of science the Liberals have pushed 
their search back beyond the dogmas of Luther 
and Calvin and the Reformation, beyond the ro- 
mantic tenderness and barbaric splendor of the 
religious imagination of the Middle Ages, beyond 
the cloud-capped theological towers erected by 
the speculative imagination in the great Christo- 
logical controversies of the early centuries, be- 
yond the preéxistent Lord Jesus of Paul and the 
eternal Logos of John, back to the absolute, trust- 
worthy, historical fact. What happens? The 
Jesus, who as the effulgent Son of God has domi- 
nated the Christian imagination for centuries, 
dwindles into a simple Galilean peasant, about 
whose family and education we know practically 


13 J, R. Nixon, “The Evangelical Dilemma,” Atlantic Monthly, 
Sept., 1925, p. 369. 


202 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


nothing, the place of whose birth and the date of 
whose death are still matters of scholarly debate. 
We have his naive monotheism, his famous dis- 
course on the mount with its emphasis upon meek- 
ness and love, his eschatological dreams of the 
impending doom of the world, his intense ethical 
and spiritual inwardness. Can these simple facts 
be made to bear all the later stupendous super- 
structures erected during nineteen hundred years 
by the free creative energy of the religious imagi- 
nation of the western world? Can this simple 
gospel of the Fatherhood of God, the kingdom of 
heaven, and the law of love provide complete 
satisfaction for the varied religious needs of mod- 
ern culture? It may well be doubted. 

In his zeal for a religion based on fact and 
made so simple and so free as to satisfy individual 
needs while escaping the shafts of scientific eriti- 
cism, the Liberal has greatly restricted religion. 
He threatens, with the best of intentions, to de- 
prive the modern man of all those rich and beauti- 
ful symbols, both theoretical and devotional, that 
are the tested creations of centuries of religious 
experience and in which are enshrined imperish- 
able religious values. Liberalism, with its exces- 
sive yielding to a _ scientifically minded age, 


LIBERALISM 203 


threatens to clip the wings of the religious imagi- 
nation so that it is no longer able to perform its 
ancient and legitimate role of idealizing and in- 
terpreting human life. In its eager desire to pro- 
pitiate the world of scientific fact Liberalism is in 
danger of losing its birthright, the world of the 
imagination. It is quite possible to simplify and 
modernize and rationalize until all that is left of 
religion are the bare and empty doctrines of 
eighteenth century deism and the inspirationless 
platitudes of an ethical idealism. The gap is only 
imperfectly filled by a ‘‘social gospel.’’ 

In spite of their bitter quarrel, Fundamentalist 
and Liberal are closer akin than they are aware. 
Both make religion depend upon fact, not upon 
symbols of the religious imagination. The Fun- 
damentalist, with his blanket-stereotype of uncrit- 
ical supernaturalism, includes in the category of 
fact both the events of history and the fictions of 
the imagination. The Liberal, by pinning his faith 
to a minimum of fact established by the historian 
as to the historical Jesus and the gospel he 
preached, is forced to discredit the fictions of the 
religious imagination with the result that his gos- 
pel is vastly more poverty-stricken than that of 
the Fundamentalist. The Liberal, in spite of a 


204 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


simplified creed, must still champion a system of 
dogma and a fixed and authoritative faith. The 
Liberal, therefore, is under the necessity, no less 
than the Fundamentalist, of developing an apol- 
ogetic and all the heavy artillery necessary for 
the defense of a moral and religious absolute. 
Both seem to forget that compelling religious 
symbols need apologetics and assertions of moral 
and religious finality just as little as do great 
poetry or great art. Liberalism, therefore, no 
more than Fundamentalism escapes the nemesis 
eternally dogging the heels of every form of re- 
ligious absolutism, namely, that later generations 
may discover its alleged ‘‘facts’’ to be mere illu- 
sions. If the history of religion teaches us any- 
thing it is that the faith of one age frequently 
becomes superstition to the next. 

What is the inference to be drawn from the 
survival of religion in spite of the failure of re- 
ligious beliefs to bear the test of fact? Is it not 
that the center of religious interest lies in the 
field of the imagination rather than in that of 
scientific fact? It is a cardinal weakness of both 
Fundamentalism and Liberalism that they fail to 
recognize the subordinate role of fact in religion. 
Shall we say, then, that religion belongs to those 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 205 


self-imposed illusions by which the cynic tells us 
men live? This brings us to a consideration of 
the radical’s reply to the query, ‘‘ What is Chris- 
tianity?’’ 


4. CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH. 


Liberalism, as we have seen, differs from 
Fundamentalism in that it draws a distinction 
between the religion of Jesus and the religion 
about Jesus. The former belongs to the realm of 
fact, and the latter is a fiction of the religious 
imagination which devoted followers have freely 
attributed to Jesus, much as Plato made Soc- 
rates the mouthpiece for his philosophy. The 
Fundamentalist, thanks to his naive supernatural- 
ism, cannot separate the religion of Jesus from 
the religion about Jesus. <A divinely inspired 
record guarantees for him the historical value 
of what the authors thought about Jesus as well 
as what he actually was. The Liberal critics, in 
their search for the historical Jesus and his 
teachings, tend to discredit as later encum- 
brances the gospel about Jesus. They regard the 
traditional history of Jesus as very largely leg- 
endary. Their task is to reconstruct the real 


206 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


Jesus and his teachings out of the fragmentary 
gospel records. While never doubting the his- 
toricity of Jesus himself, the negative Liberal 
eritic of the traditional account of Jesus has sur- 
rounded him with an atmosphere of skepticism. 
The liberal critics thus paved the way for a 
group of radicals who deny that Jesus ever lived 
and say that Christianity is a myth. 

The negative effect of Liberalism is directly 
traceable to its affiliations with science. The pre- 
suppositions of modern science and natural law, 
accepted by the Liberal critics, are at variance 
with the presuppositions of the sacred writers. 
They wrote for an uncritical and miracle-loving 
age. They were unable to distinguish clearly be- 
tween natural and supernatural, subjective and 
objective. They did not separate the symbol of 
the imagination from the thing symbolized. 
They had no regard for accuracy, but gave free 
reign to their literary inventiveness, and ar- 
ranged their material to accentuate their belief 
in the divine nature and mission of Jesus. When 
we strip away all these assumptions, as is done 
by the Liberal critics, early Christianity becomes 
something totally different from the picture we 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 207 


have of it in the record. The tendency of this is 
to make Jesus seem more unreal. 

While searching for the facts as to Jesus’ life 
and teachings, the Liberal, especially when influ- 
enced by the idea of evolution, tends to make re- 
ligious values more or less relative. The factual 
setting of the past conditions the religious values 
of the past, hence these values can never be final 
for the present. The assumption of a final reve- 
lation of religious truth through Jesus can hardly 
be reconciled with the notion of evolution. This 
relativism tinging the Liberal’s religious philos- 
ophy tends to weaken the religious authority of 
Jesus and plays into the hands of the radical. 

The Messianic consciousness of Jesus, as it is 
portrayed in the gospels, is an insoluble enigma 
for the Liberal. To make the personality of 
Jesus intelligible he must seek another explana- 
tion. There are three possible ways of explain- 
ing the enigma of Jesus’ personality in the gos- 
pels. We may take the view of the gospels and 
assume that in every thought and act he was 
guided directly by God. This would make him a 
supernatural being, and therefore a mystery. A 
second explanation is that he was mentally un- 


208 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


balanced. A third theory, and that adopted by 
the critics, is that the picture we have of him is 
not historically true, but is the result of a con- 
fusion of actual history with later fictions of the 
religious imagination of his followers after they 
had begun to worship him as a god.** However, 
the fiction of Jesus as the Messiah or God-man is 
so inextricably intermingled with history that its 
critical elimination only heightens our uncertainty 
as to the personality of Jesus. It was, then, per- 
fectly natural for the radicals to claim that Jesus 
never existed except as a fiction of the religious 
imagination. Thus the Liberal critics, even by 
their search for historic truth, unintentionally 
created an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty 
which made it possible for the radicals to say 
that Christianity is based on a myth. 
Curiously enough the facts accumulated by the 
student of comparative religion in antiquity ap- 
pear in many ways to confirm the radical’s nega- 
tive inferences drawn from the Liberal’s histori- 
eal analysis of the sacred records. This is espe- 
cially true of the mystery-cults which were the 
religion of the masses in late antiquity and which 
undoubtedly influenced Christianity. The secrecy 


14 Case, The Historicity of Jesus, p. 13. 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 209 


surrounding these mystery-cults, together with 
the absence of trustworthy literary sources, make 
it difficult to say just what they were. The Chris- 
tian references to them, while helpful, are obvi- 
ously prejudiced by the intolerance of Christian- 
ity toward all rival religions. The mystery-cults 
are of interest to the student of the religious 
imagination because of their antiquity. In re- 
ligion, as in no other phase of life, it holds true 
that vetustas adoranda est. The roots of the mys- 
tery-cults lie far back in the primitive religious 
reactions aroused by elemental phenomena of 
birth, death, spring, winter, sunrise and sunset. 
In an agricultural and pastoral stage the reli- 
gious imagination struck out crude symbols which 
represented the religious values called out in con- 
nection with elemental and yet vital concerns of 
life. There were two main sources of the mys- 
tery-cults, Phrygia in Asia Minor and Thrace, 
from which came the cult of Dionysus, the god of 
wine, and of the regenerative forces of nature. 
By virtue of their intimate association with 
powerful instinctive drives of human nature, the 
mystery-cults have always been emotional and 
passionate rather than intellectual and reflective. 
This explains why they are a religion of symbol- 


210 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


ism and deal with creations of the religious imagi- 
nation. 

With the maturity of ancient culture the mys- 
tery-cults grew in popularity among the lower 
classes and because of their intimate association 
with ways of life became the practical religion 
of the masses. As classical culture reached its 
prime, these mystery-cults tended to become small 
brotherhoods or sodalities which, to contrast them 
with the established religions of the city-states, 
have been called phases of ‘‘Hellenic Noncon- 
formity,’’? though in the characteristic tolerance 
of antiquity they flourished unmolested. The cult 
of Orpheus was typical of this stage, as were 
also the great Hleusinian mysteries. After the 
rise of the Roman Empire the mystery-cults, prof- 
iting by the world-wide theocrasia, or mingling 
of cults and gods, spread until they not only be- 
came the religion of the masses, but even enjoyed 
special favor of the emperors and practically sup- 
planted the outworn Roman national religion.” 

The mystery-cults are creations of the religious 
imagination. Theirs was a religion of pure sym- 
bolism. They sought a regeneration of the indi- 
vidual, a palingenesis. For this they used sym- 


15 Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. 44. 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH Qi1 


bols of all sorts, an elaborate cultus with sudden 
alternations between thick darkness and brilliant 
lights, sacrificial meals, baptisms of blood, and 
secret and lonely vigils of mystic contemplation. 
The object was to induce subjective mystical 
states through which the individual became one 
with the god, shared his sufferings and his tri- 
umphs, became purified from sin, and in the 
beatific transforming vision of the deity gained 
assurance of immortality. The mystery-cults thus 
represent some of the purest and most typical 
creations of the religious imagination in the his- 
tory of religion. This, apart from their influence 
upon Christianity, makes their study especially 
valuable as throwing light upon the religious 
imagination. 

The mystery-cults were furthered by the forces 
at work after the conquests of Alexander which 
delocalized religion. The empires of Alexander 
and of Rome wiped out the city-state, which was 
presupposed in the national religions of Greece 
and Rome, and paved the way for a world-wide 
theocrasia, or mingling of gods and cults. This 
intermingling tended to get the gods discredited. 
No one god was given preeminence. The en- 
forced equality of peoples brought an enforced 


212 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


equality of gods. As the individual deities lost 
their outstanding traits or were blended with 
other deities, the tendency was to fall back upon 
the universal elements in religion. A cosmopoli- 
tanism and sense of unity among all peoples de- 
manded as its counterpart the dropping of the 
peculiarities of creeds and gods and the emphasis 
of universal religious needs. This universal note 
is especially strong in the mystery-cults. They 
were invariably religions of redemption from 
sin. In all the varied cults of Dionysus, Mithras, 
Isis, Attis, and the rest, the redemptive note is 
strong. The religious problem was essentially the 
same as that of Paul, namely, the putting off of 
the Old Man and the putting on of the New Man. 
The Christian doctrine that there is no remission 
of sin without the shedding of blood, expressed 
in the Christian hymn, ‘‘There is a fountain filled 
with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins, and 
sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their 
guilty stains,’’ found a gruesome parallel in the 
famous blood-bath of the Attis cult which is thus 
described: ‘‘A trench was dug over which was 
erected a platform of planks with perforations 
and gaps. Upon this platform the sacrificial bull 
was slaughtered, whose blood dripped through 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 213 


upon the initiate in the trench. He exposed his 
head and all his garments to be saturated with 
the blood; then he turned round and held up his 
neck that the blood might trickle upon his lips, 
ears, eyes and nostrils; he moistened his tongue 
with the blood, which he then drank as a sacra- 
mental act. Greeted by the spectators, he came 
forth from this bloody baptism believing that he 
was purified from his sin and ‘born again for 
eternity.’ ’’ ** 

The mystery-cults also sought to satisfy the 
eternal longing for oneness with the deity, for 
salvation through a direct vision of the god that 
assured immortality. 

The mystery-cults appealed because they were 
a religion of the emotions rather than of the in- 
tellect. This also was largely the result of the 
breakdown of local cults. The individual was 
thrown back upon his own inner life. The emo- 
tions that formerly were disciplined and institu- 
tionalized by means of long-established forms of 
worship were now left without objective support. 
They were precipitated as it were in the social 
solution due to the world-wide mingling of re- 
ligions. The drama of religion was transferred 


16 Angus, op. cit., p. 94. 


214 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


from the objective established national cultus to 
the inner life of the individual. The mystery- 
cults were especially adapted to meet this indi- 
vidualistic and emotional need. They were the 
religion of the masses and made their appeal 
through symbols, not through creeds or philoso- 
phy. Symbols alone suffice to meet the needs of 
the emotional life, especially after it has lost 
touch with the immediate concrete setting. For 
the emotions are free from the limitations of time 
and space; they do not lend themselves to the 
sequence of a logical proposition, nor do. they 
admit of the strict conceptual definition necessary 
for a dogma. They can be effectively expressed 
only through symbols. 

To the leveling effect of Macedonian and Ro- 
man empires and to the emotional individualism 
that rose upon the ruins of nationalism must be 
added a third factor that tended to encourage a 
religion of pure imagination, namely, the over- 
simplified world-view of the ancients. A note of 
naive realism tinged the thought of the ancient 
world from Homer down to the close of antiquity. 
Antiquity, unlike the modern world, did not draw 
a clear line of demarcation between natural and 
supernatural, objective and subjective, symbol 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 215 


and the thing symbolized, fiction of the imagina- 
tion and fact of common sense. It was this more 
than anything else that made possible the inimita- 
ble freshness and beauty of Greek poetry and 
sculpture. The canons of art are easier to apply 
where reality is grasped as a whole, even though 
grasped superficially. With our accumulation of 
exact knowledge and deeper insight into the un- 
fathomable complexities of the soul, of society 
and of nature, both poetic and religious imagina- 
tions can give us interpretations that are only 
halting, imperfect, and piecemeal. Men lack both 
the imaginative power and the symbols that can 
adequately body forth the many-sidedness of the 
reality they sense. There is much to be said for 
the contention that the most satisfying creations 
of the religious as of the artistic imagination lie 
in the past. 

The mystery-cults thus presuppose a long pe- 
riod of development and refinement. Symbols 
derived at first from the crude worship of pas- 
toral and agricultural peoples were taken up into 
the religious folkways of the lower levels of the 
population and purified and spiritualized by the 
secret religious brotherhoods and associations 
such as the Orphic cults of classical antiquity 


216 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


until finally they attained in the days of Imperial 
Rome such a level of moral and spiritual refine- 
ment in the mystery-cults that they appealed to 
the purest and best spirits of the pagan world. 
The various popular mystery-cults with their 
cult-heroes, their ~savior-gods, their secret and 
elaborate liturgies and sacramental agencies for 
satisfying the universal religious needs, were the 
background out of which Christianity sprang. 
What more natural than that the radical critics, 
already convinced by the results of Liberal criti- 
cism of the paucity of the evidence for the fac- 
tual existence of Jesus, should jump to the con- 
clusion that Christianity was only one of many 
contemporary religions of pure symbolism, an- 
other fiction of the prolific religious imagination? 

The mythical interpretation of Christianity 
dates from the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. It received its first respectable statement, 
however, towards the middle of the century from 
the pens of Strauss and Bauer, both of whom 
were influenced by Hegelian idealism. Bauer 
started with the Hegelian philosophical assump- 
tion that history is merely the unfolding of an 
idea. On the basis of this speculative position 
he asserted that no historical person, but an idea, 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 217 


is the essence of Christianity. He stressed the 
absence of non-Christian evidence for Christian- 
ity during the first century, the obviously apolo- 
getic character and hence historical untrustwor- 
thiness of the writings of the New Testament, 
and claimed that Christianity can be explained by 
factors at work in the pagan world.” 

Since the beginning of the twentieth century 
there has arisen another crop of writers seeking 
to prove the mythical character of Christianity. 
Most important among these is Drews, the author 
of The Christ Myth, though Drews acknowledges 
his debt to the brilliant American mathematician 
and philosopher Prof. W. B. Smith. Drews 
stresses five points. The first is that the great 
uncertainty among Liberal scholars as to the 
Jesus of history, even granting that he did exist, 
makes it impossible and unwise to base religious 
life of today upon such a precarious foundation. 
The second argument is based upon the rich 
material accumulated by the students of compara- 
tive religion and especially the evidence that goes 
to show how very widespread and popular were 
the various forms of the mystery religions with 
their cult heroes and savior deities. Drews and 


17 Case, op. cit., p. 39. 


218 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


‘Smith contend that before the rise of Christianity 
there existed among the Jews the cult of a Jesus- 
god, modeled after the prevalent pagan mystery- 
cults of dying and rising deities. It was this cult 
and not the historic Jesus that formed the basis 
for Christianity. Emphasis is laid, in the third 
place, upon the fact that for Paul, who chiefly 
shaped the destiny of early Christianity, a cult of 
Jesus is always presupposed in all he says, while 
there is no evidence of a Jesus of history. It is 
claimed, in the fourth place, that the actual gospel 
records do not give us the life of a man but of 
a god-man, who while portrayed in realistic fash- 
ion in a Jewish setting is really a Jewish counter- 
part of the widely prevalent deities of the mys- 
tery religions. Finally, it is contended that what- 
ever cannot be fitted into this explanation is un- 
important. All those factors of prime importance 
such as the crucifixion, resurrection, last supper, 
and baptism are all borrowed from the earlier 
Jesus-cult or suggested by the many popular mys- 
tery-cults."® 

It is not the purpose of this discussion to argue 
the historicity of Jesus. But some pertinent 
questions can be put to the radicals who seek to 

18 Case, op. cit., pp. 54 ff. 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 219 


make Christianity a pure fiction of the religious 
imagination similar in nature and origin to the 
mystery-cults, with which it had many things in 
common. How are we to explain that these cults 
disappeared while Christianity grew in power? 
The answer is to be sought in the weaknesses of 
the mystery-cults and the elements of strength in 
Christianity. In spite of the long process of re- 
finement the mystery-cults never stripped off the 
pagan naturalism that gave them birth. The re- 
ligious and moral sensibilities of the Christian 
would never have tolerated the carrying of a 
symbol of the male organ of generation in a 
public religious procession as was frequently 
done in the mystery-cults. Christianity, further- 
more, kept its skirts comparatively clean at first 
from the debasing magic associated with the 
worship of the rival cults. Christianity was at 
first, like the cults, a religion of an inner emo- 
tional attitude, but as time went on it secured a 
check against the danger of undisciplined emo- 
tionalism by assimilating, even though imper- 
fectly, Greek thought. This the mysteries never 
did. 

To its stern and lofty ethic and a reasoned be- 
lief must be added one other great asset of Chris- 


220 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


tianity not enjoyed by the rival mystery-cults, 
namely, the incalculable compelling power of a 
great religious personality. ‘‘There never was a 
Mithra, and he never slew the mystic sacramental 
bull. There never was a Great Mother of sorrows 
to wail over Attis and to become a true mother 
to the sorrowing daughters of humanity. Isis, in 
all her splendor, was but the product, however 
idealized by the religious instinct, of Hgyptian 
zoolatry. ‘Come thou Savior’ was addressed to 
Dionysus, a creation of Chthonism. Apollo, the 
special god of the Pythagoreans, who declared, 
‘I dwell with less pleasure in the resplendent 
heavens than in the hearts of good men,’ was the 
lofty culmination of a cult which saw in the sun 
the image of the good. The Logos of the Stoics 
was a pure abstraction, the inspiration of which 
would touch only the enlightened, and of their 
ideal wise man Plutarch declared, ‘He is nowhere 
on earth, nor ever has been.’ The Logos of Philo 
was merely a Hypostasis, or, at best, never 
stepped beyond the limits of personification.’’ 
But the Jesus of the gospels really lived, and even 
through the golden halo of an eternal and pre- 
existent godhood which the pious imaginations of 


19 Angus, op. cit., pp. 310 ff. 


CHRISTIANITY AS PURE MYTH 221 


his followers threw around him one can still de- 
tect the outline of a real man and a rare religious 
genius. Against the impact of his powerful per- 
sonality the bright creations of the religious 
fancies of men could not compete. 

When we have thus paid our tribute to the his- 
toricity of Jesus, it remains true that Christianity 
never entered upon its career of world-conquest 
until, rooting itself firmly in this concrete back- 
ground of historical reality in the person and 
work of the man Jesus, it launched into competi- 
tion with these mystery-cults in the unreal and 
symbolic world of the religious imagination. In 
other words, it was not until the Jesus of history 
had been transformed in the imaginations of Paul 
and John and the rest into a symbol, that is to 
say it was only after the son of Joseph and 
Mary had been identified with the eternal Logos 
and the crucified Son of God, that he was able 
to make conquest of the hearts of men. Jesus’ 
own words can be applied to himself, though in 
a sense he never imagined, ‘‘He that saveth his 
life shall lose it and he that loseth his life shall 
save it.’’ Thanks to the play of devout religious 
imaginations, we have largely lost the real his- 
toric Jesus. But it was necessary that he should 


222 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


be lost, caught up and glorified and set as a flam- 
ing symbol in the spiritual firmament of man- 
kind, that he might enter upon that larger and 
fuller life that has been his for the best part of 
two thousand years. The insignia of divinity 
and eternity only befit the spaceless and timeless 
world of the religious imagination. 


5, MODERNISM. 


That section of Christianity represented by the 
Roman Catholic Church offers at least four points 
of contact with modern culture, namely, dogma, 
rites, policies and an inner spirit that is partly 
romantic and partly mystical. The Catholic 
Church, thanks to a long history, has developed 
a marvelous capacity for adjusting itself to its 
environment without surrendering its basic idea 
of an international theocratic autocracy. The 
autocratic organization and policies of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church, together with its ancient 
rites and dogmas, which are strongly tinged with 
medievalism, are obviously inconsistent with a 
modern culture dominated by scientific methods 
and democratic ideals. It is to be expected, there- 
fore, that this wise and tactful politico-religious 


MODERNISM 223 


organization would seek to avoid conflict with 
modern culture by not stressing either dogma or 
rites and by carefully smoothing over the funda- 
mental incompatibility between its political phi- 
losophy and democracy. An apologetic of this 
sort is found in the scholarly and well-intentioned, 
but not entirely successful, studies by Ryan and 
Millar, The State and the Church. If therefore 
there is to be any effective rapprochement be- 
tween the Catholic Church and modern culture it 
must be through the fourth and last point of 
contact, namely, the inner mystical spirit. As a 
matter of fact we find that this rapprochement 
did take place and finally developed into the 
movement known as Modernism, in the latter 
part of the nineteenth century. 

The homeland of Modernism is France, the 
most cultured of Roman Catholic countries, 
though it claims followers and sympathizers 
wherever intelligent Roman Catholics are to be 
found. Loisy, the scholarly historian and exegete, 
first gave something like a formal statement of 
the movement in his book, The Gospel and the 
Church, published in 1902. But the acknowledged 
leader of the movement, up to his death in 1909, 
was the English Jesuit, George Tyrrell, who, in 


224 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


a series of monographs, the chief of which are 
Lex Orandi, 1907; Medievalism: A Reply to Car- 
dinal Mercier, 1908, and Christianity at the Cross- 
Roads, 1909, has given an eloquent and able in- 
terpretation of the movement. Modernism is the 
term applied by Pope Pius X to the movement in 
his lengthy encyclical letter of condemnation Sep- 
tember 8, 1907, and it is asserted that he took the 
term ‘‘from the Jesuit Fathers in Rome, with the 
obvious purpose of discrediting tendencies of 
thought of which he understood neither the rich- 
ness nor the depth.’’ *° 

The movement, which threatened for a time to 
dismember the Roman Catholic Church, was sup- 
pressed with an iron hand; its leader Loisy was 
excommunicated; and a severely anti-Modernist 
oath was exacted from those under suspicion. 
Owing partly to the economic dependence of the 
clergy and partly, doubtless, to the lack of deep 
and vital interest in religion, especially among 
the Latin peoples, the movement has disappeared 
beneath the surface. Whether it has spent its 
force or will emerge again only time can tell. 
The genius of the Catholic Church does not per- 


20 Paul Sabatier, Modernism, p. 71. 


MODERNISM 225 


mit of compromise in any form and this may 
force those of Modernist inclinations to find sat- 
isfaction for their religious needs outside the 
fold of a church still in the grip of medievalism. 
It is hardly an accident that Catholic communi- 
ties offer the greatest extremes of belief and 
unbelief. 

Modernism is an exceedingly complicated move- 
ment, but its central philosophical idea is that of 
‘‘divine immanence”’ or the pantheistic notion of 
an indwelling, creative and directive spiritual en- 
ergy. Neither Loisy nor Tyrrell were philoso- 
phers except in a loose and pragmatic sense. 
They absorbed their mediating philosophical 
ideas from the intellectual atmosphere of the 
time. They found many points of similarity be- 
tween the traditional mystical and romantic Cath- 
olic idea of the Church, as the external manifesta- 
tion of an indwelling spiritual energy, and the 
intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, 
such as Burke’s conception of society as a living 
organism, Herbert Spencer’s social vitalism of 
the evolutionary biological type, German idealism 
and even Carlyle’s romantically pantheistic ejac- 
ulations on heroes and hero worship. Modernism 


226 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


has affiliations not only with science, and espe- 
cially organic evolution, but also with Hegelian- 
ism, the Pragmatism of William James, the crea- 
tive evolution of Bergson and the romanticism 
which, Proteanlike, has permeated, in one form 
or another, our modern life. 

Modernism’s basic idea of an organic develop- 
ment, at first largely unconscious of its goal but 
becoming gradually more self-conscious and pur- 
poseful, can be traced directly to two thinkers, 
Caird, one of the ablest English champions of 
Neo-Hegelianism, and Newman with his idea of 
development laid down in his Development of 
Christian Doctrine, first published in 1845 and in 
a revised form in 1878, after the author’s con- 
version to Catholicism. Newman, who is really 
the spiritual father of Modernism, thus states his 
central idea: ‘‘The increase and expansion of the 
Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations 
which have attended the process in the case of 
individual writers and Churches, are the neces- 
sary attendants on any philosophy or polity which 
takes possession of the intellect and heart, and 
has had any wide or extended dominion.... 
From the nature of the human mind time is nec- 
essary for the full comprehension and perfection 


MODERNISM 227 


of great ideas. ... This is what may be called 
the Theory of the Development of Doctrine.’’ 
This development is the work of communities, 
not of individuals. For ‘‘it is carried on through 
and by means of communities of men and their 
leaders and guides; and it employs their minds 
as its instruments, and depends upon them while 
it uses them.’’* The test of the vitality of an 
idea is the richness and variety of its prolifera- 
tions. ‘‘And the more claim an idea has to be con- 
sidered living, the more various will be its as- 
pects; and the more social and political is its 
nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its 
issues, and the longer and more eventful will be 
its course.’’”*> The idea, moreover, expands by 
virtue of its own inner, unreflective power. Cit- 
ing the parable of the mustard seed, ‘‘which a 
man took and hid in his field’’ but which thrives 
by virtue of its own inner life ‘‘so that the birds 
of the air come and lodge in the branches 
thereof,’? Newman says, ‘‘Here an internal ele- 
ment of life, whether principle or doctrine, is 
spoken of rather than any mere external mani- 
festation; and it is observable that the spontane- 
21 Development of Christian Doctrine, pp. 20, 30, 


22 Op. cit., pp. 38, 39. 
23 Op, cit., p. 56, 


228 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


ous, aS well as the gradual, character of the 
growth is intimated... it is not an effect of 
wishing and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, 
or of any mechanism of reasoning, or of any mere 
subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own innate 
power of expansion within the mind in its sea- 
son,’’ ** 7 

What, then, for the Modernist is ultimate fact 
in Christianity? It is not found, as the Funda- 
mentalist asserts, in an inspired document nor 
are we, with the Liberal, to identify it with a 
body of historical facts as to the life and teach- 
ings of Jesus. It is to be found only in the un- 
folding life of a spiritual community, which, in 
the language of Tyrrell, ‘‘is slowly realizing the 
ideas and ends in whose service it was founded,”’ 
a community which ‘‘through many fluctuations 
and errors and deviations and recoveries and re- 
actions is gradually shaping itself into a more 
efficient institution for the spiritual and moral 
development of individuals and societies.’’ 

If we take a cross section of this continuous 
unfolding life we shall find certain values or 
ideas which are permanent and the varying 
forms, symbols or whatnot through which a 

24 Op. cit., pp. 73, 74. 25 Medievalism, p. 145. 


MODERNISM 229 . 


given age seeks to express these values. Chris- 
tianity, then, seen immediately and from the 
point of view of one moment in its life, is a syn- 
thesis ‘‘not between the old and the new indis- 
criminately, but between what, after due criti- 
cism, is found to be valid in the old and in the 
new.’’** The very opposite of Modernism is 
Medievalism, or the traditional Catholic point of 
view, which ‘‘is only a synthesis effected between 
the Christian faith and the culture of the late 
Middle Ages.’’ *” 

It would be hard to find a more scathing ar- 
raignment of the blunting effect of Medievalism, 
or the Catholic type of Fundamentalism, upon 
the intellectual sensibilities of men than is given 
by Tyrrell in the following passage: 

““The idée-meére of Medizevalism’’ is that it 

‘“oives the authority of divine revelation to 

a mass of untenable historical and scientific 

statements that belong merely to the primi- 

tive expression of revelation. One knows 
how even a single false premise will develop 
into a vast and complex system of falsehoods 
the further one pushes the argument that it 
vitiates. Bind men’s consciences, then, to a 


26 Op, cit., p. 143. 27 Op. cit., p. 144. 


230 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


whole host of such premises; forbid them to 
criticize them; force them to bring the results 
of their observation and reasoning into ac- 
cord with them; compel them to defend such 
premises against all gainsayers, against all 
texts and facts and documents that may be 
adduced against them, and the result must be 
just what it has been—a profound inward 
skepticism begotten of the apparent conflict 
between truth and truth; an absence of any- 
thing that deserves the name of intellectual 
conviction; an inability to understand or re- 
spect such conviction in others; a readiness to 
think black is white when so commanded; a 
habit of controversial chicanery and dishon- 
esty that strikes at the very root of candor 
and truthfulness.’’ *° 
The Modernist’s organic conception of life pro- 
vides a congenial basis for mediation between the 
church and modern culture. For if the Modern- 
ist ‘‘believes in the Church as a Catholic, as a 
man he believes in humanity; he believes in the 
world.’’*® To assert that the world is God-for- 
saken and worthless, that its progress in science, 
art, education and civic freedom is a godless prog- 


28 Medievalism, p. 180. 29 Op. cit., p. 147. 


MODERNISM 231 


ress simply because it is secular, ‘‘seems to the 
Modernist the most subtle and dangerous form 
of atheism.’’ The Modernist even goes so far 
as to say that ‘‘his faith in the world is more 
fundamental than his faith in the Church,’’ an 
almost unbelievable assertion from the lips of a 
Catholic, because the world is ‘‘the living whole 
of which she is but an organic part; and the 
whole is greater than its most vital organ.’’ The 
Church and the world are thus most vitally and 
inseparably united; ‘‘each must absorb the quick- 
ening forces of the other under pain of a mon- 
strous and lopsided development.”’ 

This organic evolutionary note of Modernism, 
which is merely the logical expansion of Newman, 
enables it to make common cause with all the so- 
cial, economic or political forces in the community 
striving for a larger and more human existence. 
It is not surprising, then, to find in France and 
other lands movements for social democracy and 
reform being instinctively drawn to Modernism. 

Revelation is conceived by the Modernist in 
terms of this organic and evolutionary idea of 
society. ‘‘Revelation is divine,’’ but not in the 
orthodox Fundamentalist sense of an objective, 
supernatural imparting of truth. It is ‘‘an ex- 


232 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


perience that utters itself spontaneously in imagi- 
native popular non-scientific form.’’ That is to 
say, this indwelling and directing divine energy 
registers itself through the evolving religious ex- 
perience of the community of believers. ‘‘Theol- 
ogy is the natural, tentative, fallible analysis of 
these experiences.’’ Theology, therefore, is a 
human product. It is the result of the play of 
the intellect of man over the raw experience of 
the religious consciousness of the community 
through which contact is made with the divine. 
Therefore, theology is true and helpful just in the 
measure that it grows out of and ever returns to 
the collective religious experience of those who 
‘‘live the life and breathe the hope of the Gospel 
preached by’ Jesus.’’*° Theology, then, cannot 
be tied down to any ‘‘stereotyped statements, but 
only to the religious experiences of which certain 
statements are the spontaneous self-chosen, but at 
most symbolic, expressions.’’ ** 

The implications of these statements are: (a) 
dogmas are not fixed but vary with the ever evolv- 
ing life of the Church. (b) Dogmas are not exact 
statements of truth and reality, for religious re- 
ality is so intimate and subjective that it beggars 


30 Op. cit., p. 129. 81 Op. cit., p. 152. 


MODERNISM 233 


exact scientific analysis. (c) The raw material of 
dogmas are symbols or fictions of the imagina- 
tion which do not purport to give us truth or 
reality. Dogmas, therefore, can never be more 
than mere logical and critical refinements of fic- 
tions of the religious imagination. (d) The sym- 
bols of the religious imagination are ‘‘spontane- 
ous’’ and ‘‘self-chosen,’’ that is to say, they arise 
directly out of the exigencies of the given reli- 
gious experience and are in no sense deductions 
of reason nor can they be safely made the basis 
for final deductions as to religious truth or real- 
ity. The symbols of one stage of religious ex- 
perience may not satisfy the demands of a re- 
ligious experience of a later period. 

The attitude of the Modernist towards science 
is both frank and fearless. He demands ‘‘abso- 
lute freedom for science’’ and he would have it 
fettered only ‘‘by its own laws and methods.”’ 
All experience, including the spiritual as well as 
the natural, belongs to the field of science. The 
Modernist, in fine, ‘‘has nothing to do with that 
sort of more educated and temporizing ultra- 
montanism that shrinks from an inopportune 
pressing of principles which the world has un- 
fortunately outgrown; that loves to rub shoulders 


234, WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


cautiously with science and democracy; that 
strives to express itself moderately and grammat- 
ically; that would make a change of circumstances 
and opportunities pass for a more tolerant spirit; 
and that is usually rewarded for its pains by find- 
ing itself between the hammer and the anvil.’’” 

Finally, the Modernist has the courage of his 
convictions and when asked by the Fundamental- 
ist what is to be the upshot of this world of or- 
ganic and unremittent development, in which it 
must be admitted there is no place for a ‘‘finished 
theological system,’’ he replies, ‘‘I do not know.”’ 
What he does know is that ‘‘the whole world is 
in labor,’’? and there is no prophet who can tell 
us exactly what the morrow will bring forth. Our 
vision reaches only to the horizon, not beyond it. 
Truth, like life, ‘‘is an unending process of ade- 
quation, not a finished result.’’ * 

It is not difficult to point out weaknesses in 
Modernism. Its very modernity doomed it to in- 
evitable failure. Of all institutions, the Roman 
Catholic Church is the last that can comfortably 
accommodate itself to the basic assumption of 
Modernism. How is it possible for a church 
whose boast is eterna non caduca to make a place 


32 Op. cit., p. 153, 83 Op. cit., p. 157. 


MODERNISM 235 


within its borders for the unbridled creative evo- 
lution of the Bergsonian type preached by Tyr- 
rell? The encyclical letter of Pius X, September 
8, 1907, that killed Modernism, was merely an in- 
evitable move for self-preservation. Moreover, 
Modernism, or this curious potpourri of the or- 
ganic evolution of Spencer, the social vitalism of 
Burke, the dynamic idealism of Hegel, the creative 
evolution of Bergson, the opportunistic Pragma- 
tism of William James, all tinged with romanti- 
cism, is utterly at variance not only with the Ro- 
man Catholic Church, but with original Christian- 
ity and the ancient culture that gave it birth. The 
spirit of the Roman Empire still lives in the Ro- 
man Catholic Church. Modernism reeks with the 
spirit and the methods of modern culture. It is 
based upon theses utterly at variance with the 
Middle Ages and antiquity. The Catholic Church 
has always strenuously contended that it alone 
is the legitimate heir of Jesus and the aposiles. 
The Modernist contentions would strip it of this 
leadership and make it only one of the various 
manifestations, both Christian and non-Christian, 
of the divine indwelling spirit of God in mankind. 
For both Catholic and Protestant of the orthodox 
type Jesus is the unique and eternal and final 


236 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


embodiment of religious truth. According to the 
Modernist Jesus is merely a link in a chain, a part 
of a long process of religious evolution. Modern- 
ism, finally, is exposed to all those criticisms that 
have ever been leveled at the dynamic idealism of 
Hegel and the romantic intuitionalism of Berg- 
son.** 

It will not be denied, however, that of all the 
attempts to solve the problem of the relation of 
fact and fiction in the Christian faith, Modernism 
is the most interesting and suggestive. Modern- 
ism avoids the twofold weakness of Liberalism, 
namely, the undue narrowing of the essence of 
Christianity down to a minimum of historical 
facts as to the life and teachings of Jesus and 
the consequent discrediting of the subsequent cre- 
ations of the religious imagination in historic 
Christianity. It also avoids the impasse of Fun- 
damentalism whose naive supernaturalism hope- 
lessly obscures the whole question of fact and fic- 
tion in religion. Finally, its sense of historical 
values saves it from the subjectivism of the radi- 
cals who would make Christianity a pure fiction 
of the religious imagination. The dynamic ideal- 
ism of Tyrrell, with all its weaknesses, does offer 


34 See Berthelot: Un Romanticisme utilitaire, III, pp. 324 ff. 


MODERNISM Ne 


a basis for a reconciliation between the eternal 
dualism of fiction and fact, symbol and religious 
reality. ‘To be sure, he bridges the gap only by 
subordinating the world of fact to that of value. 
By placing back of the unfolding drama of life 
an immanent directive force which is spiritual, 
the hard world of factual realities becomes affili- 
ated with that of the spirit. But it may very 
seriously be doubted whether we can ever bridge 
the gap between the facts of history and the fic- 
tions of the religious imagination without some 
such spiritual synthesis. In fact, it may be con- 
tended that some such synthesis is always pre- 
supposed by the great religious genius. For one, 
therefore, who is inclined to dispute this a priors 
assumption of dynamic idealism, the dualism, it is 
to be feared, will always remain. 

Tn this connection it is interesting to note the 
differences between the scientific historian Loisy 
and the poetical mystic Tyrrell. They approach 
the problem of fact and fiction from different 
angles. 

For Loisy the Jesus of historical fact and the 
Christ of faith are always separated by a gap 
he never succeeds in bridging, although he con- 
stantly seems to assume that the gap is bridged 


238 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


in the evolution of the Christian faith. The Jesus 
of history, Loisy contends, is the proper object 
of exact historical criticism. Here conclusions 
are reached based upon a principle of historical 
probability akin to the theory of probabilities 
used in all scientific establishment of fact. Such 
a test could not possibly be applied to the Christ 
of faith. Hence the gap between them. 

Tyrrell, on the other hand, approaches the prob- 
lem not from the standpoint of historical science, 
but from that of the psychology of religious ex- 
perience. Tyrrell presupposes that this experi- 
ence necessarily conditions the historical fact. 
Thus for Tyrrell his own inner religious experi- 
ence unconsciously bridges the gap between the 
Jesus of fact and the Christ of faith. Later, as 
his thought matured, Tyrrell sought to justify 
this religious intuition with a vague and uncriti- 
cally romantic philosophy of history, the germinal 
ideas of which were derived directly from New- 
man and indirectly from Hegel. He erected into 
a loose metaphysical system the implications of 
a subjective intuitive experience. The mystic 
Tyrrell even goes farther and asserts that this 
intuition of reality may be more trustworthy than 
the exact and objective science of the historian. 


MODERNISM 239 


In the plays of Shakespeare we have a deeper in- 
sight into reality than in the chronicles that sug- 
gested them. Similarly the gifted religious soul 
that enters deeply and intuitively into life may 
gain a firmer grip upon truth and reality than the 
coldly and critically objective scholar who deals 
only with externals while the inner life escapes 
him. For this reason Tyrrell contends that the 
deeply mystical insights into history attained by 
the devout Christian may be of more value than 
the results of historical criticism. Tyrrell here 
approaches the intuitionalism of Bergson on the 
one hand and the insights of the poet and artist 
on the other. 

It would seem indeed that without some such 
intuitive synthesis as that presupposed by Tyr- 
rell, the chasm between the world of science and 
common sense and that of the religious imagina- 
tion can never be bridged. In the eternal religious 
problem there are three factors, the immediate 
religious experience, the symbol of the imagina- 
tion by which it is represented, and the transcen- 
dental religious reality which experience and sym- 
bol seem to presuppose. The symbol arises pri- 
marily neither as a logical deduction from the 
experience nor as a scientific explanation, but 


240 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


merely as an aid to its objectification. When we 
analyze the relation of the symbol of the imagina- 
tion to the inner religious experience, we are on a 
basis of fact. When we raise the question of the 
relation of the fictions of the religious imagina- 
tion to the transcendental religious realities, we 
leave the realm of psychological fact and enter 
that of metaphysics. Men of mystical tempera- 
ment, such as Tyrrell, who assert that through 
an intuitive synthesis they have expanded the 

world of immediate religious experience with its 
symbols so as to include this world of transcen-_ 


dental metaphysical reality, can never make’ such mh 


assertions matter of scientific proof. They: are 
convincing only to those who have had similar 
mystical experiences. 


6. RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE. 


The foregoing discussion does not pretend to 
offer a final answer to the difficult question as to 
the place of religion in our*modern culture. Its 
purpose is more modest, namely, to suggest along 
what lines the answer is to be sought. The 
status of religion in modern culture is being 
sharply debated. The disputants are still far 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 241 


from agreement. The religious readjustment now 
in progress requires time and will not be hurried. 
There. are; however, certain conclusions which 
would seem to follow from what has been said. 
It should be clear in the first place that religion 
has certain necessary limitations which grow out 
of its very nature. » Religion can not be trusted 
to give us that exact knowledge we get from sci- 
ence. Religion can not give us the insight into the 
nature of ultimate reality, which is the task of 
philosophy. The reason is that religion deals 
with fictions of the imagination, symbols whose 
function is not to give us exact knowledge, but 
to make possible the objectification of inner ex- 
periences of value. Religion has much to answer 
for because she has attempted and still attempts 
to usurp the roles of scierice and philosophy. The 
result is that she has duplicated the world of fact 
and common sense with another world of Elysian 
fields, of smoking hells presided over by horned 
devils, of flocks of angels and demons. She has 
loaded the consciences of men with inexorable 
laws of harsh but unhuman deities; she has lent 
her supernaturalistic sanction to every sort of 
cruelty of man to man; she has preferred myth 
and legend to the finality of the tested principles 


242 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


of science; she has mistaken superstition for the 
voice of God; she has prolonged the existence of 
obscurantism and intolerance by clothing them 
with the semblance of truth and finality. Her 
imaginative substitute for science can never be 
more than pseudo-science. Her supernaturalis- 
tic ethical sanctions can never be more than a 
fictitious makeshift for moral wisdom. Her meta- 
physics can never be more than ‘‘a bloodless 
ballet of logical categories,’’ the theologian’s 
refinements upon fictions of the religious im- 
agination. 

Religion in the past has assumed to give us 
absolute truth, but her instruments have been 
the intuitions of the mystic or the metaphors 
of the poet. These fictions of the religious im- 
agination grew and hardened into established 
ways of thought and conduct until they be- 
came a world in themselves superimposed upon 
and often taking precedence over the hard em- 
pirical world of scientific fact, of moral wisdom 
or of human loveliness. The unpardonable con- 
ceit of religion is that while she springs from 
life and derives her symbols from life, she insists 
that they are not mere symbols, ‘‘but are rather 
information about experience or reality elsewhere 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 243 


—an experience and reality which, strangely 
enough, supply just the defects betrayed by real- 
ity and experience here.’’ 

Religion in the past has dealt with imaginative 
absolutes, with infallible ‘‘thus saith the Lords.”’ 
Hence religion is made singularly uncomfortable 
by the note of relativity that runs through modern 
knowledge. This growing sense of relativity is 
the product of the sheer complexity of modern 
society. It is no longer possible for one mind, like 
that of Aristotle in the s*mpler social order of 
ancient Athens, to compass the infinite ramifica- 
tions of human knowledge and human relations. 
It is no longer possible for a master mind to 
reduce the tangled modern order to a clean-cut 
logical system as was done by Aquinas for the 
feudal order of the Middle Ages. Absolute law, 
absolute ethics, absolute authority, take on for 
men more and more the appearance of illusions. 
There is small room in such a world for infallible 
and final solutions for all the issues of life. 

The note of relativity is still further strength- 
ened by the conclusions of science. The great 
revolutionary principle of evolution, so utterly 
distasteful to the traditional religious imagina- 
tion, makes it impossible for men to accept an 


244 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


eternally fixed body of doctrines, a faith once for 
all delivered to the saints. It is possible to retain 
the old idea of a static:God only by placing him 
outside the eternal flux as a sort of disinterested 
spectator so that he can escape the trail of the 
serpent of evolution which crept into our intel- 
lectual paradise in the middle of the last century. 
From another. source, and that least expected, 
namely, in physics and astronomy, the notion of 
relativity has gathered strength. That the bright 
realm of the stars should likewise be bathed in 
an eternal flux jars the pious imagination, for is 
not the firmament also the handiwork of ‘‘the 
Father of Lights, with whom can be no variation, 
neither shadow that is cast by turning’’? 

The traditional religious imagination is singu- 
larly lost and unhappy in a world given over to 
the idea of change. This is due in part doubtless 
to traditional habits of thought. It may be due 
also to the felt necessity for a stable background 
for the realm of religious values. Values seem 
to be safer in the hands of a changeless deity. 
A world of values in eternal flux is a strain upon 
the imagination. It demands greater faith, more 
spiritual and moral adventurousness, than is pos- 
sessed by the average man or woman. It re- 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 245 


quires an adjustment to an unaccountable ele- 
ment in experience. It assumes an element of 
contingency from which even the deity himself 
does. not escape. The conservative faces this 
element of relativity with the familiar dilemma 
‘Coither the acceptance of an infallible body of 
truth revealed by an unchangeable God or else 
skepticism and the shipwreck of faith.’’ Com- 
promise is not possible. Roman Catholic and 
Protestant Fundamentalist thus join ‘‘the agnos- 
tic in destroying a partial faith in order that 
they may drive believers to seek the shelter of 
a whole one.’’ 

A second inference which would seem to follow 
from the discussion of the preceding chapters is 
that religion cannot be trusted as a principle of 
social control. The reason for this is obvious. 
Social control is becoming more and more a ques- 
tion of the accumulation of a body of exact sci- 
entific knowledge which is wisely and efficiently 
applied to social problems. If, as has been shown, 
religion deals primarily with symbols of the re- 
ligious imagination, it cannot be trusted either 
to gather, to evaluate, or to apply the exact knowl- 
edge demanded for problems of social direction 
and social control. It is hardly an accident that 


246 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


the immediate, practical concerns of modern so- 
ciety are being more and more divorced from re- 
ligion. Since the rise of modern culture, that is 
since the close of the 17th century, this process 
of secularization has been rapid. The state, busi- 
ness, science, education, art, have all emancipated 
themselves from the control of religion. 
Perhaps the most thoroughly secularized and 
non-religious phase of modern life is business. 
This is undoubtedly due to the very real gap that 
exists between traditional religion and business, 
the most strenuously modern phase of life. Re- 
ligion deals with the fictions of the imagination, 
business with the hard facts of the market, the 
laws of the machine process and the axioms of 
common sense. To be sure, religion and economics 
were closely related in the past. Basic in the 
thought of the Physiocrats,” to whom Adam 
Smith owed much, was the idea of God working 
through nature as the only source of wealth. 
Traces of this religious background lingered with 
Adam Smith, who thought that the individualistic, 
competitive, and profit-actuated members of the 
economic order were harmonized by an ‘‘invisible 
35 A school of French thinkers of the eighteenth century who 


taught that through obedience to natural laws men are to gain 
their highest well-being. 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 247 


hand,’’ a shadowy remnant of the providential 
idea of the economic order taught by the Physio- 
erats. But it would be hard to find a less re- 
ligious book than Ricardo’s Principles of Political 
Economy and Taxation, published in 1817. This 
book of three hundred pages, which dominated 
English thought for a half century and inspired 
a whole social and industrial philosophy, does not 
once mention the name of God. 

Out of the union of the inexorable economic 
Jaws of Malthus and Ricardo and the impersonal 
mechanical forces of the machine process in the 
industrial revolution was born the non-moral, non- 
religious Frankenstein, Modern Business, which 
has defied religion more effectively than any 
other phase of modern life. Leaders of business 
respect religion and are often deeply religious 
themselves, but the successful business man never 
confounds religion with business. The one is 
factual, presupposing a body of exact knowledge 
applied to concrete problems, while religion deals 
with fictions of the imagination which may have 
moral and religious inspirational value but can 
not be made the basis for an economic program. 

No vital concern of modern life in which there 
is a demand for a scientific mastery of fact and 


248 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


a careful and unprejudiced application of tested 
knowledge to the problems concerned fails to 
suffer when controlled by religion. When great 
religious denominations prostitute their positions 
of honor and responsibility by waging an inquisi- 
torial campaign to eliminate the teaching of evo- 
lution from state-supported schools, they make re- 
ligion ridiculous. They create a situation in 
which, as at Dayton, Tennessee, the dignity and 
efficiency of the law, the facts of science and the 
values of education and religion become at once ~ 
obscured in a poisonous cloud of ignorant and 
truculent bigotry. The most shameful phase of 
the Dayton trial was its intellectual indecency. 
The explanation is clear. Religion from its very 
nature deals with beliefs, fictions of the religious 
imagination, which may serve to orient precious 
hopes, but which, by reason of their removal from 
the realm of fact and common sense, can never 
be made the basis of effective social control or 
social ethics. Evolution is a question of fact that | 
must be settled by scientifically trained men. But 
at the Dayton trial the issue was at once removed 
from the realm of fact to that of uncharted re- 
ligious beliefs. The Dayton trial settled nothing 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 249 


unless it be the utter incompetence of religion as 
a principle of social control. 

In the third place it should be possible, in the 
light of the conclusions reached, to suggest the 
place and the function of religion in modern life. 
Religion belongs to the realm of ideals and values. 
Its affiliations are with poetry rather than with 
science or philosophy. The religious imagina- 
tion is akin to the poetic in that it is a free 
interpretation, or, if you please, a transfiguration 
of the hard world of factual reality. The re- 
ligious imagination, like the poetic, idealizes. 
The difference between the scientific and com- 
mon-sense way of looking at things and that 
of the poet or religious seer is well stated by 
Santayana: ‘‘If meditating on the moon I con- 
ceive her other side, or the aspect she would wear 
if I were traveling on her surface, or the position 
she would assume in relation to the earth if 
viewed from some other planet . . . my thinking, 
however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane. 
... If on the other hand I say the moon is the 
sun’s sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she 
is a virgin and once looked lovingly on the sleep- 
- ing Endymion, only the fool never knew it, my 


250 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 


lucubration is mythical. ... The elements are 
incongruous and do not form one existence but 
two, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted 
dramatically, and having at best to the first the 
relation of an experience to its symbol.’’ * 

Now it is a fundamental trait of the religious 
imagination that it takes objects, persons, situa- 
tions, or events and turns them into symbols. 
They must undergo this transforming process be- 
fore they gain that universality and that eloquent 
spiritual appeal which the brute fact never has. 
The classical example of this is the transforma- 
tion by the Christian imagination of the Jesus of 
history into the Christ of religious worship. 
These great symbols of the religious imagination 
become in time weighted with moral values. They 
form a super-world in which the wrongs of this 
life are righted, the hideous failures made good, 
the shattered hopes realized. So powerful is the 
appeal of this super-world with its symbols of 
spiritual values distilled from brute reality, so 
congenial and human it is, so pulsating with hu- 
man hopes, so warm with the very life blood of 
the race that it becomes vested with a sense of 

36 Life of Reason, III, 128. 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 251 


reality that may even take precedence over the 
reality of the immediate world of brute fact. 

In simpler and less critical ages religion thus 
was able to assume a dictatorial position in so- 
ciety. Even in the Middle Ages theology was 
called the queen of the sciences. This is now no 
longer possible. Deeper psychological insight into 
the nature of the religious experience, a clearer 
grasp of fact and fiction, the sobering effect of a 
mass of scientifically tested fact, an understanding 
of the vastness of the universe and the limitations 
of the human mind have combined in creating a 
situation in which we are no longer deceived as 
to the essentially fictional character of the sym- 
bols of the religious imagination. 

What finally is the place of fact and fiction in 
the religion of the masses of men? A cross section 
of the religious life of the masses today, as in the 
past, will reveal the existence of what might be 
called a bookless religion. Few, indeed, in Prot- 
estant or Roman Catholic communions read and 
inform themselves on religious issues. Nota frac- 
tion of the members of a given church know what 
heresy is—or care. Very few can state the creeds 
of their churches. Only a minority follow the 


252 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
squabbles of the theologians. This bookless ré- 
ligion of the masses has two poles. One is the im- 
mediate experiences of the religious values and 
the other is the traditional symbols by which these 
experiences are represented. These symbols are 
not criticized. The question is never debated as to 
whether they are logically consistent or harmo- 
nize with science. Galileo may overthrow the old 
earth-centered astronomy, Darwin may write his 
Origin of Species, or Kinstein may advance his 
theory of relativity, and the masses with their 
bookless religion go their way undisturbed. 
When the attention of the masses is called in 
some spectacular fashion, as in the Dayton trial, 
to a thesis of science such as evolution, these 
champions of a bookless religion decide invaria- 
bly in favor of the orthodox position, for they 
fear the new and the strange which they do not 
understand. They cannot fit these newfangled 
ideas into their old traditional set of religious 
symbols. It is only when the ideas of science 
and modern culture become embodied, through 
applied science or otherwise, in the prevailing 
ways of life, that they affect the thinking and feel- 
ing of the masses on religious matters. Tradi- 
tional religious symbols do in time become dis- 


RELIGION AND MODERN CULTURE 253 


credited through the educative effect of altered 
ways of life. Of the masses of men, in religion as 
in other things, it is true that they live their way 
into their thinking; they do not think their way 
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Index 


Acton, Lord, Attitude toward 
Science, 11 

Acts of the Apostles, 142 

Ad Praxean, 98 note 

American Commonwealth, 
Bryce, 30 note 

Ames, Prof. Adelbert, Jr., 95 

Anti-Christian Sociology, Rev. 
Wm. P. McCorkle, 15 note 

Apologetics, 168, 223 

Apuleius, Metam., 155 

Aristotle, 19, 243 

Arius, 97, 196 

Arnold, Matthew, 46 

Athanasius, 98, 196 

Augustine, Conversion of, 25 


Bauer, 216 

Benedict of Nursia, 66 

Bergson, 235, 236, 239 

Bible, fundamentalist fetish, 
177, 178 

Bollandist Fathers, 72 

Bousset, 169 

Bryan, William Jennings, and 
dogma, 77; and fundamen- 
talism, 27; greatest of all 
Klansmen, 8; ignorance of, 
52; on education, 34; on 
evolution and the Bible, 180 

Bryce, Lord, 29, 30 

Burke, 225, 235 


Caird, 226 

Calvin, 179, 191, 201 

Carlyle, 225 

Catholicism, alien immigrants, 
7; and the Inquisition, 178; 
attempt to suppress Mod- 


ernism, 224; dogmas of, 176, 
82; joins with Fundamental- 
ism, 245; Lord Acton on 
Science, 11; medievalism of, 
229; modernism and ortho- 
doxy, 35, 169; Roman spirit 
in, 235; also see Modernism 
Christ (see Jesus) 
Christianity, and Modern Cul- 
ture, 240; as pure myth, 205; 
basis of, 177, 188; central 
problem of, 168; compromises 
of, 196; four groups com- 
prising, 169; intolerance of 
traditional, 1938; Modernist 
definition of, 170; mythical 
character of, 217; of the 
masses, 197; oldest record of, 
117; Pagan background of, 
212, 216; proof of the origin 
of, 181; reasons for growth 
of, 219; What is it?, 168 
Christianity and Liberalism, J. 
Gresham Machen, 56 note, 
175 
Christianity at the Cross- 
Roads, George Tyrrell, 224 
Christ Myth, The, Drews, 217 
Church, missionary motive of 
the early, 120; pragmatic 
needs of the early, 119 
Common Law, The, Chief Jus- 
tice Holmes, 74 
Controversies, 76, 98, 129, 168, 
179, 201 
Council of Nica, 97, 99, 196 


Daniel, 128 
Darwin (see Evolution) 


255 


256 


Dayton, Tenn., science and the 
masses, 252; trial of evolu- 
tion at, 3, 248 

Democracy, and Catholicism, 
222; and religion, 30; power 
of mass opinion, 172; privi- 
leges’ of, 283. spiritual 
tyranny of, 33 

Development of Christian Doc- 
trine, Cardinal Newman, 226 

Docetists, 151 

Dogmas, 76, 84, 85, 158; cen- 
tral, of Fundamentalism, 
99; clash with Science, 85; 
decay of, 77, 84, 87; develop- 
ment of, 74, 82, 89; ideal 
system of, %75; Modernism 
and, 232; nature of, 81, 97, 
101; origin of religious, 82, 
134; tyranny of religious, 77 


Education, and Fundamental- 
ism, 32, 39; centers of learn- 
ing, 31, 179, 180; Denomina- 
tional Schools, 41; in the 
South, 8, 13; State-sup- 
ported institutions, 31, 248; 
vs, Evolution, 4 

Edwards, Jonathan, 19 

Einstein, 252 

Emerson, 81 

Emmerich, Anne _ Catherine, 
mystical experiences of, 159 

Emperor Worship, 143 

Enigma of Jesus, The, Cou- 
choud, 125 note 

Evangelical Dilemma, The, J. 
R. Nixon, 201 

Evolution, affiliation of Mod- 


ernism with, 226; and the 
Bible, 55, 180; and the 
masses, 252; clash’ with 


Dogma, 85; effect on doc- 
trines, 243; Fundamentalism 
vs., 17, 172; ignorant atti- 
tude toward, 9; in Modern- 
ism, 231; legislation against, 


INDEX 


3, 97; on trial, 248; Origin 

of Species, Darwin, 252; Re- 

ligion vs., 13; theories of, and 

Genesis, 63; vs. Genesis, 102 
Ezra, 128 


Fictions, artistic, 95; dogmatic, 
74; in science, 79; meaning 
of word, 94; not necessarily 
false, 63; of Genesis, 63, 68, 
87; of history, 91; of Middle 
Ages, 92; of religion, 134, 
242; varieties of, 64 


Florida, religious legislation 
in, 4 
Founding of New England, 


The, J. T. Adams, 21 note 

France, homeland of Modern- 
ism, 223; religious conflict in, 
34 

Fundamentalism, and the mod- 
ern spirit, 88; belief in 
Christ, 175; Bible a fetish 
in, 58, 68, 178; Catholicism 
joins with, 245; challenge of, 
3, 11, 189; dangers of, 33, 
34, 40; definition of, 5; de- 
mands a “show-down,” 195; 
effect of supernaturalism 
in, 177; effect of war on, 
192; “Kither-or” of, 178, 200; 
endangers integrity of re- 
ligion, 186; helplessness of, 
171; history of, 17; incon- 
sistency regarding miracle, 
174; intolerance of, 193; kin- 
ship to Liberalism, 203; men- 


tal, stereotypes of, 17a 
methods of, 8; ‘“Monkey- 
bills,” 39, 75; origin of 


dogmas of, 83, 99; real men- 
ace to, 2538; revivals, 23; 
scope of controversy, 168; 
similarity to Ku Klux Klan, 
6, 8; sin against nation, 32; 
strongholds of, 7; value of 
evolution, 87; vs. Science, 11, 


INDEX 


13, 52, 200; weakness of, 204, 
236; Wm. Jennings Bryan 
and, 8, 27 


Galileo, and Inquisition, 178; 
clash with dogma, 12, 85, 
252 

Genesis, creation story of, 102, 
107; fictions of, 10, 87; the- 
ories of, and evolution, 63, 
102 

Gods, ancient, 91, 111, 145, 149, 
183, 211, 212, 220 

Gospel and the Church, The, 
Loisy, 67 note, 223 

Gospels, The Four, 118; apolo- 
getics of, 132; character of 
Jesus in, 122, 182; essence of 
Christianity in, 190; fulfill- 
ment of prophecy, 183; God- 
man portrayed in, 218; 
legends of the, 84; miracle 
in the, 130; purpose of the, 
119, 121 


Hadrian’s Rescript an Minicius 
Fundanus, 144 note 

Harnack, Prof. Adolf, 100, 169, 
170, 190, 199 

Hegel, 19, 216, 226, 235, 236, 
238 

Heresy, 49, 98; Docetists, 151; 
ignorance of, 251; of Galileo, 
86 

Hibbert Journal, 183 

Historicity of Jesus, The, Case, 
208 

‘History of Dogma, Harnack, 
100 note 

History of European Morals, 
Lecky, 25 note 


History of Religion in the 
United States, H. K. Rowe, 
22 note 

Hobbes, 57 


Holmes, Chief Justice, 74, 100 
Hutchinson, John, 179 


257 


Ignorance, cause of anti-evolu- 
tion crusade, 53 

Imagination, biological theory 
of, 58; dangers of, in re- 
ligion, 61; deification of 
Jesus, 137; dilemma of re- 
ligious, 89; examination of 
religious, 106; fictions of re- 
ligious, 93, 97, 103, 205; func- 
tions of the, 62; fundamental 
trait of religious, 250; Jesus 
in the religious, 78, 110, 115, 
122, 125, 127, 134; John’s 
mystical, 152, 159; origin of 
religious, 65; Paul’s’ con- 
tribution to religious, 115, 
116, 141, 148; problem of 
religious, 67, 90; religious, 
of Middle Ages, 201; results 
of religious, 221; supreme 
role of the, 125; symbols of 
religious, 53, 69, 72, 106, 174; 
traditional religious, 244; 
types of, 63, 64; value of 
human, 57; weakness of 
Fundamentalist, 173 

Inquisition, 178 

Irenzus, 77 

Isaiah, 134 


James, William, 226, 235 

Jesus, actual knowledge of, 
110; cult among pre-Chris- 
tian Jews, 218; description 
of, by Paul, 115, 142; dogmas 
regarding, 75, 76, 84; dual 
personality of, 109, 164; 
dwindling figure of, 201; 
early opinions regarding, 
111, 112, 113; enigma of, 
123, 164, 207; failure to 
prove Messiahship, 131; 
Farewell Supper of, 160; 
Fundamentalist picture of, 
175, 176; Gospel picture of, 
119, 122, 132; historicity of, 
108, 220; idealization of, 


258 
186, 165; in the religious 
imagination, 110, 115, 122, 


125; John’s picture of, 152, 
159, 161; Liberal and Funda- 
mentalist opinions of, 199, 
205; “Lord of glory,” 139; 
Messiahship of, 127; miracles 
of, 180; modern controversy 
about, 169; mystery of his 
life, 122; non-Christian ref- 
erences to, 112; or Christ, 
108, 110; Paul’s letters, 113; 
prophecies and fulfillment, 
134; religious importance of, 
110; second coming of, 128; 
Sermon on the Mount, 66; 
“Son of Man,” the, 125, 138; 
symbol of the ascension, 93; 
theories regarding, 207; 
triple personality, in mod- 
ern religion, 176; “Word be- 
came flesh,” the, 151 

Jews, historical picture of 
Jehovah, 197; Jesus-god cult 
among, 218; tradition and 
prophecy, 135, 138 

John, deity of Jesus in gospel 
of, 118, 129, 160; Logos of, 
201; mysticism of, 152, 158, 
159; realism of Jesus’ pic- 
ture, 152, 158; _ religious 
imagination of, 221 

Josephus, on Jesus, 111 

Journal of Social Forces, 15 
note 


Kant, 19 

Kentucky, religious legislation 
in, 4 

Ku Klux Klan, methods of, 8; 
similarity to Fundamental- 
ism, 6, 8; strongholds of, 73 
William Jennings Bryan and 
the, 8 

Ku Klux Klan, The, Mecklin, 
7 note 


INDEX 


Kurios Christos, W. ‘Bousset, 
138 note 


Laws, against evolution, 3; 
Florida, 4; Kentucky, 4; 
North Carolina, 5, 18; South 
Carolina, 4; Tennessee, 3, 28 

Legends, 72, 108, 184 

Lex Orandi, George Tyrrell, 
224 

Liberalism, aims of, 189, 196; 
and science, 169, 197, 200; 
characteristics of, 192; criti- 
cism of, 195; danger to 
Christianity in, 201, 202; ef- 
fect of war on, 192; handi- 
caps of, 194; kinship with 
Fundamentalism, 203; nega- 
tive effect of, 206; origin of, 
189, 190; religion restricted 
by, 202; search for Jesus, 
175, 176, 199; weakness of, 
204, 236; what it is, 186; 
world’s debt to, 191 

Liberty, religious, 50 

Life of Reason, Santayana, 250 

Locke, 19 

Loisy, 66, 182, 223, 225, 287; 
excommunication of, 224 

Luke, 93, 118, 119, 129, 142 

Luther, 96, 191, 201 


Macaulay, Lord, 23 

Malthus, 247 

Mark, 118, 119, 129, 142 

Matthew, 118, 129, 134 

Medievalism, 229 

Medievalism: A Reply to 
Cardinal Mercier, George 
Tyrrell, 224 

Mencken, H. L., 5 

Mind, action of the, 58, 59 

Ministerial Association of 
Charlotte, N. C., ten resolu- 
tions of, 13 


Ministers, number and _ in- 


INDEX 


fluence of, 40; qualifications 
of, 45, 48 

Miracles, 130, 161, 173, 174 

Modern Business, origin of, 
247 

Modern Culture, 171, 240 

Modernism, Catholic, 169, 170; 
aims of, 189; attempted sup- 
pression of, 224; attitude 
toward dogmas, 88, 232; 
creed of, 230; evolution in, 
231; Fundamentalism vs., 
55; homeland of, 223; lead- 
ers in, 223, 226, 235; nature 
of, 189, 225; Science and, 
226, 233; superiority of, 236; 
Tyrrell’s theories, 238; ulti- 
mate fact in religion of, 228; 
weaknesses of, 234; Protes- 
tant, 169, 170 

Modernism, Paul Sabatier, 224 

Monarchians, 98 

“Monkey-bills,” 39, 75 

Morley, Lord, 47 

Mystery-cults, ancient, 208, 219 

Mystery Religions and Chris- 
tianity, The, Angus, 210 

Mysticism, 158, 159 

Mystic Way, The, Underhill, 
153 note 

Myth, 72, 83, 169; Christianity 
as, 205 


Napoleon, 57, 61 

Newman, Cardinal, 
231, 238 

Newton, 107 

Nicene Creed, 76, 196 

North Carolina, and evolution, 
13; religious legislation in, 5 


170, 226, 


Obscurantism, 37 

On Compromise, John Morley, 
48 note 

Origin of Species, Darwin, 252 

Orthodoxy, and modern culture, 


259 


78; and the masses, 252; by 
legislation, 3; in politics, 12; 
Protestant, 169; retreat from 
tradition, 181 


Paul, as theologian, 149; con- 
version and development of, 
25, 141; doctrines of, 75, 84, 
139, 150; faith of, 140; Jesus- 
cult in teaching of, 218; 
letters of, 113, 147; Lord 
Jesus of, 115, 142, 201; re- 
sult of religious imagination 
of, 221; spokesman of gen- 
tiles, 139; visions of; 70 

Paul V, Pope, 178 

Physiocrats, 246 

Pius X, Pope, 224, 235 

Plato, 82, 172 

Pliny the Younger, 112, 144 

Pluralistic Mystic, A, William 
James, 167 note 

Plutarch, Lives, 73, 220 

Politics, religion in, 8, 12 

Presbyterian of the South, The, 
10 note 

Primitive Religion, character- 
istics of, 66 

Principles of Political Econ- 
omy and Taxation, Ricardo, 
247 

Prophecy and Fulfillment, 135 

Protestantism, in Germany, 
190, 191; Liberalism and 
orthodoxy, 169; also see Lib- 
eralism 

Psalms, 134 

Public Opinion, Lippmann, 172 


Quest of the Historical Jesus, 
Schweitzer, 182, 199 


Realities, religious, 104, 105; 
symbols and, 101 

Reason, in religious experi- 
ence, 67 


260 


Religion, absolutism of, 243; 
and business, 247; and Mod- 
ern Culture, 240, 249, 251; 
dictatorial position of, 251; 
fictions of, 242; not a prin- 
ciple of social control, 245; 
responsibility of, 241; 
usurped authority of, 241 

Religious Imagination (see 
Imagination) 

Revivalism, 23, 25, 128, 150 

Ribot, 64 

Ricardo, 247 

Ritschl, 191 

Romanticisme  utilitaire, 
Berthelot, 236 

Rousseau, 64 


Un, 


Santayana, 249 

Schleiermacher, 191 

Science, and religion, 67, 173, 
179, 197, 233; and the masses, 
252; Fundamentalism vs., 11; 
Ignorance vs., 9; in denomi- 
national schools, 41;  in- 
herited authority of, 186; 
Lord Acton on, 11; “make- 
believes” in, 79; symbols used 
in, 69 

Secularization, modern, 246 

Shakespeare, 239 

Shelley, 62, 103 

Smith, Adam, 83, 246 

Smith, Prof. W. B., 217 

Socrates, 46 

South Carolina, religious legis- 
lation in, 4 

Spencer, Herbert, 225, 235 

State and the Church, The, 
Ryan and Millar, 223 


INDEX 


Strauss, 216 

Suetonius, 113 

Supernaturalism, Biblical, 173; 
in Fundamentalist _ belief, 
177 

Symbols, and reality, 101; his- 
torical, 73; of Genesis, 92; 
religious, 101, 185, 252; 
stereotyped, 172; value of, 
71 


Tacitus, Annals, 113 

Tennessee, cause of anti-evolu- 
tion law, 97; evolution trial 
at Dayton, 248; religious 
laws of, 3. 

Tertullian, 98 

Theological 
America, 
note 

Theology, birth of Christian, 
121 

Thomas Aquinas, 243 

Tocqueville, de, 33 

Tyranny, of religion, 12; of 
religious dogma, 77 

Tyrrell, George, 223, 225, 228, 
229, 235, 236, 238 


Education im 
R. L. Kelly, 42 


Vierte Hvangelum, 
Schmiedel, 163 
Voltaire, 17 


Das, 


Wesley, John, 180 
Westminster Confession, 196 


What is Christianity?, Har- 
nack, 199 

Winchell, Prof. Alexander, 
180 


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